"taxi here tomorrow at 7am… ok..." - The 1'st time I came to Japan, I had some instructions from a fellow colleague, some of them where an almost funny set of topics regarding how to go from the Narita Airport to the hotel, the remaining where some interesting topics about Japan, one of them being the fact that in Japan everything works as expected…


We left our Ryokan in Nikko at 7 am, before any of the owners or servants arrived. In the day before we had asked for a taxi to pick us up at 7 am to take us to the train station… In Portugal there would be a considerable probability that the taxi might not be there, but in this case there it was… As expected…

Japanese people act like precise pieces of a huge machine that was fine tuned to perform according to the expectations (this does not directly mean fast, and sharply, although sometimes it does)… What's amazing in the middle of this is that people keep their kindness and warmth to the maximum...

"no, we don't see many Portuguese people around here, I know a bit of Spanish, but not Portuguese"... - The attendant at one of the Ginza shops was helpful and nice as usual in Japan, he was also fond of Brazilian food and could say some words with Brazilian Portuguese accent.


Japan is different from what I remember from 10 years ago... Probably I'm different too and this adds to the sensation of change. This time I'm seeing a country that is much more open to foreigners than before, old people don't run away from us anymore when we approach them in the street and even those who don't speak English are always willing to help.

Those who know me, know that I'm much more a "middle of nowhere person" than someone that enjoys crowded places... "crowded" could be a 1'st, a single word description for Japan... So some of you might ask "what a hell am I doing here?"...

This was not a trip we planned for a long time and in fact it all started one month before departure when all the other options we where considering did not seam to be viable... Still Japan looked like a good idea for breaking with my usual stile of large and insolated landscape pictures...


Crowded is not really close to the best word for describing Japan and in fact I'm not sure there is one... Even in crowded places there's some kind of silence that brings me back to my own thoughts, there's a sense of order and respect from all those who share the same space with us. Sometimes I wonder if this sensation of silence might come only from the fact that we can't understand the language... But I guess that's not the only reason...

"Are you alone?... Aren't you afraid?..." - The first thing someone asked me 10 years ago, the 1'st time I came to Japan...


I remembered this today as I walked through the Narita Express train platform... 10 years ago, Japan was my 1'st business trip and also the 1'st time I traveled alone... Coming here on hollydays 10 years after that is olny casual (it hapened) but I can't help thinking about what went through my life since that time...

Japan was the 1'st of many, the start of this addiction for discovering places and was also a lesson on how different other people can be and on how things we take for granted are not always all there is...

"This may look impossible but my car is dirtier than yours..." - A colleague comments that my scratched and beaten up 4x4 looks cleaner than her fancy car…

My answer was somewhere of the lines of "this is probably because I'm not having much fun these days"… I have no explanation for this, but sometimes I feel that my capacity for using the 24 hours of each day to my advantage does not depend only on how crouded my agenda is…

Sometimes there's some kind of rhythm that seams to make everything possible... Sometimes, the simplest task (like updating this blog) seams to take an enormous amount of energy…

Sometimes we need a plan or something in the horizon for helping us keep the focus… And many other times when we get to that point in the horizon we get that empty feeling of "now what?!"… Today I feel like I'm in this same point in several dimensions of my life...

The image you see here is part of my Canadian Rockies portfolio from 2 years ago… Along with others most of these images where still not seen by anyone outside my home office… For now they're just waiting here for the next wave in order to get out in the world...