I`ve spent almost the whole last day traveling. I wish I could just beam myself to Korea like they do in Star Trek. Life would be so much easier.... maybe too easy.

I left San Diego for LA on an Amtrak train at 6:15 on Thursday morning. Other than being tired from only four hours of sleep the ride was great. When I arrived in LA, I took a city bus to the airport. Now, that was a cross cultural experience I didn` expect and I hadn`t even left the States! If you haven`t ridden a city bus in what ever city you live in, I recommend trying it at least once. It makes you feel more attached to the people of the city because the bus creates a sense of communal suffering~ an interesting experience for us very individualistic Americans. As it was, I was the only white person on the bus for the entire 1.4 hour ride... not that I minded. I actually found it fascinating. I saw parts of LA that reminded me of the book, The Jungle which traces the life of an immigrant family Chicago during the late 1800`s, I think. It got me thinking how unusual America is as an immigrant country. Seriously, there`s no other country like it when it comes to the diversity and amount of modern day immigrants. There`s a lot more I could say about that but I`ll save if for later.

I`m in Japan at the moment, waiting to my flight to Seoul. My flight from LAX was a little long; 12 hours of being smashed inside a cylindrical tube of metal with 300 other people makes you a little crazy. I sat next to a group of three very talkative Taiwanese women who obviously confused the inside of a plane for a basketball game and kept shouting at each other. It`s times like that when I wish I was narcoleptic... at least a little.

Today`s traveling adventures will come to an end 24 hours after they began when I check into a motel in Seoul tonight. But I have it easy. I just met a guy who flew from Kuwait to Miami to Hawaii to Japan!! Glad I`m not him.