3rd century Chinese travelog about ROME

[gewing]

This could inspire some great stories.   Sorry if someone else posted it, I just spotted it and thought it was too cool not to post over here. 

 

http://io9.com/heres-what-third-century-china-thought-about-the-roman-1253007513/all

[薔薇語]

Interesting accounts. That said, it isn't exactly surprising. As I recall there were trade routes that stretched from Italy and Greece all the way to Japan. There have been recoveries of various artifacts and art works that seemed to have very strong Classical Greek influence. 

La Rose. 

[Narf the Mouse]

When the only way to get half-way across the world is to walk, if you want to go half-way around the world, you walk.

[Markdoc]

When the only way to get half-way across the world is to walk, if you want to go half-way around the world, you walk.

 

Actually the Romans apparently mostly sailed. Smart fellas those Romans. The earliest Roman trade mission to China that we have documented evidence for, during the antonine period, apparently entered China via what is now Vietnam, and what appears to be Roman material has been found in Vietnam at Óc Eo: possibly a colonia (trading post) or possibly material brought from India, where we know that the Romans did have trading posts. According to early maps, the Romans had an outpost in what's now eastern India or Bangladesh. Since the Roman Empire controlled Egypt and the Levant, the safest trade route for Romans was across the Mediterranean to Egypt or Palestine overland to the Red Sea and then down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean to India and from there to East Asia. The Greeks had been using that route as well and Ptolemy and others have left us descriptions of it.

 

As far as trade goes, the Romans conducted active trade with China, mostly for silk (the India trade focused on pepper). There are numerous roman sources documenting this - including Pliny's well-known rant - but we can see that it was big deal because of the numerous laws attempting to restrict the trade. As far as we can tell though, almost all of that trade went via intermediaries along the silk road: Romans (in what's now Turkey) trading with Parthians, Parthians trading with Kushans, and Kushans trading with Chinese (you can sub out any of the various tribal/ethnic groups in the middle with others as political fortunes waxed and waned). We don't know how many - if any - Romans actually made the trip the whole distance. As an aside, I spent a month last year travelling the Chinese leg of the old (northern) silk road. It's pretty tough terrain so I can see why people did not make the whole trip! Also we drove about 6000 kilometres and that's less than half the total distance (I plan on doing the other half another time).

 

cheers, Mark

[Roter Baron]

You surely do a lot of travelling!   

 

What I did not quite understand: Did this Chinese historian/ geograph write down story that he heard about Rome and the lay of the land (that is what I presume) or did he actually visit Rome? The description sound more like hearsay.

 

And again: Was it the hearsay from a Chinese visitor to Rome or the talk of a Chinese who once met a Kushani who had had a beer at a bar with a Parthian who knew a Greek who had a sister who married a guy from the Illyricum who then moved to Rome?

[assault]

Gathered from a range of sources, if Wikipedia is anywhere close to accurate.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weil%C3%BCe

[Markdoc]

You surely do a lot of travelling! 

 

I try to visit at least one new country a year, and given my interests, naturally gravitate to the ones with ruins, old castles and temples

No new countries this year, sadly - we've decided to go back to Japan for holidays, since we liked it so much last time, and there's so much more to see.

 

What I did not quite understand: Did this Chinese historian/ geograph write down story that he heard about Rome and the lay of the land (that is what I presume) or did he actually visit Rome? The description sound more like hearsay.

 

And again: Was it the hearsay from a Chinese visitor to Rome or the talk of a Chinese who once met a Kushani who had had a beer at a bar with a Parthian who knew a Greek who had a sister who married a guy from the Illyricum who then moved to Rome?

 

The guy who wrote that was a Chinese court official. He was apparently responsible for collecting information about foreign kingdoms, and as far as we know, never left central China, although he compiled several books. From what has survived of his work (not much 1800 years on!) he seems to have gathered all sorts of material, without too much filtering, so real stories that might have been taken from travellers and merchants are mixed up with old myths and folktales, plus official Chinese documents that were already a couple of hundred years old when he started his work.. 

 

Until the Romans turned up in China, it's not clear that anyone ever made the whole trip between Rome to China (though of course some people might have done - they just didn't leave a record). It wouldn't be a big surprise if nobody ever did make the trip before: Rome was often at war with the neighbouring kingdoms, so a Roman travelling through those lands would find few friends and much of the trip was across barren lands and mountains with no laws to protect foreigners. A single traveller would almost certainly be robbed and either killed or enslaved, while merchants normally travelled in large groups for protection. The ways things normally worked was that a group of merchants based in one place would travel a part of the route that they already knew and where they had contacts with the local rulers. So Chinese merchants carried goods to - say - Jiayuguan, where Chinese rule normally ended and then sell them to merchants allied to whatever group ruled the oases in the western desert at that time. In turn these guys would meet up with merchants allied to the steppes nomads further west and do another deal. That crew would haul the goods over the mountains and across the steppes to the next city (which one depended on what route they chose.)  Then the merchants from that city would travel across the steppes to the next city, do their deal and then head for home. The steppes were pretty lawless areas for most of this period, so we're not talking about a merchant and his guards, but a whole mass of merchants and their guards and helpers - sometimes hundreds of people.  I've visited a few of the old caravanserais, and the biggest I've seen, in places like Aleppo could easily hold a couple of hundred travellers - and it was just one of many caravanserais in the old city. The merchant trains would normally wait until they had enough people (and money) to cut a deal for safe passage with the local powers. The whole process was involved enough that it could take a long time - months (or occasionally years) might go by between merchant caravans. One Chinese (Tang Dynasty) document I saw indicated that they would send a major caravan every 2-4 years. Of course, at the next city, you'd have to repeat the process, until you got to Persia or the Roman Empire itself, where things were a bit more ordered. For a single traveller, that would mean cutting a deal with each caravan, and many months of delay. Possible, but far from easy.

 

No wonder the Romans sailed around the long way.

 

But it wasn't just Romans. We know the Chinese sent out emissiaries. One guy - Gan Ying - apparently got as far as Persia before giving up and going home. That sounds defeatist, but consider - China to Persia sounds like a long way, but actually you're still only about halfway to Rome (admittedly, the hardest part is behind you). Chinese merchants sailed to East Asia and occasionally made it as far as the Middle East - they certainly made it as far as Indonesia and Malaysia, where they set up trading colonies, and probably also in India. The sea route was also important to China - that's the route that Chinese porcelain made it to the middle east. Admiral Zheng He also apparently made it as far as the middle east on his famous voyage of discovery in the mid-1400's.

 

And of course, Chinese merchants and pilgrims also made it over the mountains into northern India and then on to Persia that way. In China I also visited the Big Goose pagoda established by the monk Xuanzang, to translate the buddhist sutras he brought to China.

 

So lots of people travelling back and forth along part of the route, and swapping stories about what they had seen or heard, but few, if any, making the whole trip.

 

cheers, Mark

[薔薇語]

Coming to Japan this year? Where abouts? I hope you enjoy it!

 

La Rose.

[Lawnmower Boy]

This is all crazy talk.

 

It's well known that people didn't travel in the old days. A man who'd been twenty miles from his birthplace was counted well-travelled; go fifty, and they were burnt as witches. (Bizarre behaviour, plus also a shortage of firewood.) Travel 100, and you were beyond the protection of custom and kin, and, as likely as not, butchered alive and devoured for your tangily exotic flesh. 

 

And that's if you could travel. As is well known, due to customary agricultural practices, all inhabited landscapes consisted of yards-deep mud interspersed with deep, bubbling pools inhabited by oddly Muppet-looking, heavily-fanged predators. Conversely, uninhabited landscapes consisted of sterile, rolling, sandscapes of dunes. (Think the less-frequented parts of major Southern California beach destinations within an easy drive of the Troma production offices.) Obviously, you weren't getting very far in that!

 

Not that you had very long. Average life expectancy was 21, and bearing in mind all those people who died of common, easily-preventable childhood diseases such as progeria, amnesia, consumption or anaphylactic shock, people were basically dropping dead in their tracks every few steps. Not much point in travelling anywhere when anyone with half a consideration bone in his body (usually removed by leaching back then, but that's another story) was arranging his funeral so that the corpse wagon drivers wouldn't have to bother, being busy all the time, what with the plague and all.

 

Speaking of, even if you could travel, you'd just be carrying some horrible, old-time epidemic disease like smallpox or beri-beri, which would inevitably kill a hundred percent of the people you met, even if you survived. Not much point in telling a travel story when everyone who hears it, dies. Am I right, or am I right?

 

Not to mention that even if you could tell your story, it would be a) incomprehensible to everyone, it being that no-one could understand the accent of the next village over, the dialect in the next county, or the language across the river. You could write it down in a univeral written language such as Latin, Arabic, Persian or Classical Chinese, but since no-one except Old Wu in Anyang, Abdul in Baghdad, and Lenny in Rome could read, there wasn't much point.

 

But if you did actually communicate your story, you have to bear in mind that you were telling it to powerful people, who were famously paranoid and arbitrary. Why, if I had half a mind, I'd tell more stories about vagrant storytelllers being executed by slicing with crucifiction by  drawing and quartering for chance lines like, "The sky is blue." Pro-tip: Never say that to a khagan whose favourite colour happens to be green, if you prefer not being able to see your pancreas with your own eyes. 

 

Mind you, communicating requires a working mouth, and once your teeth are all out from rot, that tends to take a back seat compared with the more important tongue-work of getting that gruel down your throat without choking to death. Sure, you could mime it --if your hands had not fallen off from leprosy, as, let's face it, they probably had. You could scratch it with a stick on a clay tablet with your toes, to be sure, but that's only since the Scientific Revolution, when Newton invented sticks. 

 

So, yeah, this old Chinese story is just that --a story. I don't even know when it was forged. In the Nineteenth Century, by nationalist agitators? In the Twentieth, by Marxist propagandists? In the 21st, by a cabal of Silicon Valley libertarian pirates? Either way, we can be sure that it doesn't reflect what the ancient Chinese court thought about Rome.

 

Obviously. I mean, if they were curious about Rome, they could just get their alien astronaut buddies to give them a ride over in their flying saucer. 

[assault]

The China to Iraq sea route was pretty regularly travelled by the time of the Yuan Dynasty (Mongols), but that was basically a thousand years after the third century.

 

Even then a fair bit of the trade was through intermediaries, but the main thing is that the main world civilisations - China, India and the Caliphate - were regularly connected.

 

Eventually the European states, tiring of being a backwater in a system they knew existed, muscled their way in. The Spanish found some cr*ppy islands. The English found some fishing grounds (which the Basques and Portuguese probably already knew about). The Portuguese found the sea route to India.

[Markdoc]

Coming to Japan this year? Where abouts? I hope you enjoy it!

 

La Rose.

 

 It's not until the end of the year (we're combining a week's holiday in Japan with a trip back to New Zealand). With only a week, I don't want to spend a lot of time racing around. Last time we spent a week in Tokyo, with a couple of day trips to nearby destinations. The next trip we'll do the same, just based in Kyoto. If you are nearby it could be cool to meet

 

cheers, Mark

[L. Marcus]

"Kyoto: the anagram lover's Tokyo!"

[薔薇語]

It's not until the end of the year (we're combining a week's holiday in Japan with a trip back to New Zealand). With only a week, I don't want to spend a lot of time racing around. Last time we spent a week in Tokyo, with a couple of day trips to nearby destinations. The next trip we'll do the same, just based in Kyoto. If you are nearby it could be cool to meet

 

cheers, Mark

Kyoto is a wonderful place. That is where I live now. I am not sure where I will be come the holidays but if I am still in Kyoto, I would love to show you some of the sights. Worse comes to worse, I can at least give some suggestions on local winter attractions.

 

 

La Rose.

[Markdoc]

Kyoto is a wonderful place. That is where I live now. I am not sure where I will be come the holidays but if I am still in Kyoto, I would love to show you some of the sights. Worse comes to worse, I can at least give some suggestions on local winter attractions.

 

 

La Rose.

 

Great!

 

Cheers, Mark

[Old Man]

Kyoto is a wonderful place. That is where I live now. I am not sure where I will be come the holidays but if I am still in Kyoto, I would love to show you some of the sights. Worse comes to worse, I can at least give some suggestions on local winter attractions.

 

Kyoto--it's a magical place!

 

Or at least it was when I was there 11 years ago.  Beautiful temples, excellent food, nice people, and uncannily punctual buses. 

[Markdoc]

The China to Iraq sea route was pretty regularly travelled by the time of the Yuan Dynasty (Mongols), but that was basically a thousand years after the third century.

 

Even then a fair bit of the trade was through intermediaries, but the main thing is that the main world civilisations - China, India and the Caliphate - were regularly connected.

 

Eventually the European states, tiring of being a backwater in a system they knew existed, muscled their way in. The Spanish found some cr*ppy islands. The English found some fishing grounds (which the Basques and Portuguese probably already knew about). The Portuguese found the sea route to India.

 

Not really a terribly accurate picture - by the time you're discussing (Yuan Dynasty) the caliphate had centuries since collapsed into mutual feuding kingdoms and the tiny rump Abbassid caliphate in Bagdad (which hadn't really controlled anything outside the area around the Tigris for about 200 years) had finally been put out of its misery by the mongols just before the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty. While the middle east once had an economy roughly the same size as western Europe in Roman times, by the 14th century it had experienced 3-4 centuries of steep decline and had an economy roughly about a quarter the size of western Europe's. For the reasons, look at Maddison's discussion in "Contours of the world economy 1-2030 AD" - but basically it was due to the breakdown in international trade, and the rise of internal trade in Europe. Bagdad, for example, which had an estimated 500-700,000 inhabitants in the 8th and 9th centuries and had been one of the world's pre-eminent cities, had dwindled to 70-90,000 in the 14th century - a bit bigger than say Siena, in Italy, or a bit smaller (and much less influential) than Venice. The whole population of mesopotamia in the 14th century is estimated to have been about half or less what it had been 5 centuries before.

 

There were three major economic spheres, all right, but the caliphate sat in between two of them - Europe and India - and was desperately dependant on trade. Historians quibble about the details, but they're quibbling about whether the middle east had an economy 20% or 30% the size of Europe's in the late medieval era - nobody's suggesting it was even close to the same size. 

 

Actually one of the interesting things - which explains a lot about world history - is that there have always been three major population and cultural centres: Europe, India and China. Together they make up about 16% of the earth's surface but for most of history, they contained about 60-80% of all humans and about 90% of all economic activity, with the remainder spread out across the globe. If you want to understand the shape of human history, there's one major factor right there. 

 

Far from being "locked out of" the asian economy, Europeans were well involved: international trade in Europe had been booming for 2 centuries by this time. You just need to look at the ornate toll houses and merchants guilds being built as the wealth poured in. Bruges, for example built a giant trade facility in 1200's, in the centre of the city where ships could sail inside, have their goods lifted by crane to overhead warehouses, or moved directly out into the market square for sale. You don't do that for a few rowboats with some bags of turnips! By the beginning of the 14th century, Genoese and Venetian companies had already established branches in India and China, in Zaytun (modern day Quanzhou) and Yangzhou: these cities had long had Arabic trading colonies too. There was enough demand by that stage, that in the early part of the 13th century, Francesco Pegolotti wrote "Practica della Mercatura" or "Practical guide for Merchants". Instead of the sort of fuzzy travelogues of earlier travellers, this one was for company employees heading out to offices in other countries. It described customs rules, weights and measures, helpful hints on how to dress and behave, information on packing favoured trade goods, etc., plus helpful phrases for trading. There was some instructions on travel and some information on places, but the bulk of it is information on exchange rates, taxes and coins (he worked for an international bank, after all). 

 

I can give you a taste of his style. Here's his information on how to cover part of the southern overland silk route into China:

 

"You may calculate that a merchant with a dragoman, and with two men servants, and with goods to the value of twenty-five thousand golden florins, should spend on his way to Cathay from sixty to eighty sommi of silver, and not more if he manage well; and for all the road back again from Cathay to Tana, including the expenses of living and the pay of servants, and all other charges, the cost will be about five sommi per head of pack animals, or something less. And you may reckon the sommo to be worth five golden florins. You may reckon also that each ox-waggon will require one ox, and will carry ten cantars Genoese weight; and the camel-waggon will require three camels, and will carry thirty cantars Genoese weight; and the horse-waggon will require one horse, and will commonly carry six and half cantars of silk, at 250 Genoese pounds to the cantar [a Genoese pound was apparently about 12 ounces]. And a bale of silk may be reckoned at between 110 and 115 Genoese pounds." etc, etc.

He has long lists of prices and exchange rates. Interesting stuff if you are interested in late medieval European economics, otherwise a bit tedious. He never went to China himself (though he worked at company offices in different countries in Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean) but compiled it from reports of other merchants. Which makes the point really: this wasn't a "book of wonders" but a practical work guide of the same kind that expat.s heading off to Asia get from their companies today.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Roter Baron]

Thanks for the info and the hint at useful literature - much obliged!

[assault]

Not really a terribly accurate picture - by the time you're discussing (Yuan Dynasty) the caliphate had centuries since collapsed into mutual feuding kingdoms and the tiny rump Abbassid caliphate in Bagdad (which hadn't really controlled anything outside the area around the Tigris for about 200 years) had finally been put out of its misery by the mongols just before the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty. 

 

 

Granted. I should have written the Ilkhanate in this particular context. The largely Islamic Middle East in general.

 

Actually one of the interesting things - which explains a lot about world history - is that there have always been three major population and cultural centres: Europe, India and China. Together they make up about 16% of the earth's surface but for most of history, they contained about 60-80% of all humans and about 90% of all economic activity, with the remainder spread out across the globe. If you want to understand the shape of human history, there's one major factor right there.

 

I think this radically understates the importance of the Middle East (and Egypt, which is effectively an extension of it).

 

It wasn't an accident that the majority of the Roman empire's population lived in the east.

[assault]

Another interesting person: Rabban Bar Sauma. A Nestorian monk (probably) from a Turkish background, who travelled from China to the Ilkhanate, and eventually to Europe. One of his companions became the Nestorian Patriarch.

[Markdoc]

I think this radically understates the importance of the Middle East (and Egypt, which is effectively an extension of it).

 

It wasn't an accident that the majority of the Roman empire's population lived in the east.

 

Except as far as we know - and granted the figures are always going to be a bit vague -, the majority of the Roman Empire's population didn't live in the East. Most estimates put the split at about 40% in the east and 60% in the West, There's always quibbling over these figures, but I haven't seen anything that suggests a majority in the East - some put it at less than 40%, some put it at a bit more ... but never a majority - even taking Egypt into account, which I agree is fair enough. Those figures also include Greece, Anatolia and much of the Balkans in the "East" since the traditional split is along the Greek/Latin axis. If you include the "european" part of the Empire (ie: Greece westwards) as part of the West, then the split becomes more like 70-30 in favour of the west.

 

I don't want to understate the importance of the region - both pre-and post Islam, it played a major role in trade and on the culture of the three major players. For example, for about 1000 years, the Asia to Europe trade was dominated by Arabs and Persians - which is pretty odd when you think about it. We know from archeology and and from Chinese and Arabic records, that Arabic and East Asian traders had long had bases in China.The Xin Tang Shu documents a thriving Arab and Persian colony in Yangzhou in the 700's and the Arabic Akhbar al-Sin wa-I-Hind records multiple Arabic trade colonies in China (in fact Abu Zaid, the author states that there were 120,000 muslim traders living there). I treat that figure with suspicion, but it's clear from archaeology and both Chinese and Arabic sources that there were a lot. They didn't just move goods, but also idea, historical artifacts and fashions - all of which had an impact at both ends of the trade routes.

 

The middle east (Egypt slightly excluded and North Africa very much excluded) derived much of its prosperity from trade and not so much local trade as passing trade between Europe and India (much of the latter ultimately derived in China). It's no coincidence that the economic (and population) decline of the middle east started shortly after the Roman empire started to experience problems in its western half because troubles in western Europe meant that resources were pulled out of the east and demand fell. Yup. Warfare in Britain and France meant falling demand and unemployment in cities in Syria. That's how important Western European demand was to global trade even back in the early days of the empire. When you consider that Pliny estimated Roman trade with India (and China, via India) at 100 million sesterces per year, you get an idea of how much trade there actually was in Roman times. And almost all of that trade ran through cities in Persia and the Arab lands, who took a percentage.

 

The division of the empire had a similarly negative effect on trade - with further economic decline for both east and west. And of course, the Islamic conquest hit trade even harder, disrupting for a while, the vital trade lifeline of many Eastern cities. Between about 300 AD and 1300 Ad, the population of Persia, Anatolia and greater Syria all fell (in some areas, it more than halved) ... while the populations in India, China and Europe all increased about 0.1% a year, more than doubling over the same period. The effects and causes are clear. I've visited the "dead cities" of Syria - a whole arc of cities and large, prosperous stone built towns that survived more or less intact because they didn't fall to plague or war. They were simply abandoned when trade dried up and their citizens drifted away in search of work - first to other cities in greater Syria, later to Anatolia and the Eastern Empire.

 

So ... influential? Very. Dominant? No, not so much (or more accurately, not even). Ironically, the trade problems that further afflicted the Middle East/Asia in the 14th and 15th century (endemic warfare in Persia and Arabia, destruction of cities that had been trade hubs by the Mongols and their successors, the lockdown on private sea trade in China) did a lot to drive European expansionism. It wasn't - at least initially - dreams of empire, so much as affluent households all over Europe going "Where is the ****ing pepper?"

 

cheers, Mark

[DShomshak]

I remember consulting Pegolotti when I did a quick bit of research for my "Fantasy Europa" campaign, though I only looked at his list of "spices" -- which back then meant any relatively high-value commodity that wasn't cloth. In addition to what we would call spices, Pegolotti included dyestuffs, alum, perfumes, sugar, medicinal herbs -- even paper. I thought it was a pretty interesting look into the world, and world-view, of late Medieval commerce.

 

Dean Shomshak

[Narf the Mouse]

Actually the Romans apparently mostly sailed. Smart fellas those Romans. The earliest Roman trade mission to China that we have documented evidence for, during the antonine period, apparently entered China via what is now Vietnam, and what appears to be Roman material has been found in Vietnam at Óc Eo: possibly a colonia (trading post) or possibly material brought from India, where we know that the Romans did have trading posts. According to early maps, the Romans had an outpost in what's now eastern India or Bangladesh. Since the Roman Empire controlled Egypt and the Levant, the safest trade route for Romans was across the Mediterranean to Egypt or Palestine overland to the Red Sea and then down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean to India and from there to East Asia. The Greeks had been using that route as well and Ptolemy and others have left us descriptions of it.

 

As far as trade goes, the Romans conducted active trade with China, mostly for silk (the India trade focused on pepper). There are numerous roman sources documenting this - including Pliny's well-known rant - but we can see that it was big deal because of the numerous laws attempting to restrict the trade. As far as we can tell though, almost all of that trade went via intermediaries along the silk road: Romans (in what's now Turkey) trading with Parthians, Parthians trading with Kushans, and Kushans trading with Chinese (you can sub out any of the various tribal/ethnic groups in the middle with others as political fortunes waxed and waned). We don't know how many - if any - Romans actually made the trip the whole distance. As an aside, I spent a month last year travelling the Chinese leg of the old (northern) silk road. It's pretty tough terrain so I can see why people did not make the whole trip! Also we drove about 6000 kilometres and that's less than half the total distance (I plan on doing the other half another time).

 

cheers, Mark

The narrator stated they they did a lot of walking, and "sleeping in an ox's footprint", or in short, sleeping by the sides of roads.

 

That is what I was addressing. The mode of transportation used by the narrator, as stated by the narrator. They probably did take a ship or two, but as a poor scholar, they'd get only working passage. Which wouldn't be that much different, to the direction of my statement, than walking.

[Markdoc]

Kyoto is a wonderful place. That is where I live now. I am not sure where I will be come the holidays but if I am still in Kyoto, I would love to show you some of the sights. Worse comes to worse, I can at least give some suggestions on local winter attractions.

 

 

La Rose.

 

Ugh - only 2 weeks have gone by and now I have to reverse myself. Yesterday I accepted a new job offer. I'm staying with my current company but joining the global team, which means I'll be moving to Belgium in September. I can get my unused Danish holiday time paid out, but I can't transfer it to Belgium, so I have to start accumulating holiday from scratch. I doubt that my new boss will be cool with me taking a month's leave 3 months after I start - especially given that negotiations over the job have dragged on over the last 3 months: she wants me on the team ASAP (well, straight after the August holiday break, which is pretty much the same thing).

 

So, no Kyoto for us this year - it'll have to be next year. I'm also going to really, really, really miss living in Copenhagen and all our friends. Brussels is OK, but we have great social group here. Starting again from scratch is going to suck (sigh).

 

On the plus side, it opens up a whole new region of Europe to explore in detail. I'm also looking forward to working on the global team: this puts me in a position to help with policy and practice across the whole company.

 

So thanks for the kind offer - we'll have to take a rain check for now.

 

cheers, Mark

[薔薇語]

I see. Well, I hope you enjoy your new position and all that it entails! If you do make your way back over to Japan at some point, always feel free to shoot me a message. I am more than glad to give pointers or travel advice. 

Actually, I may be moving to Tokyo in a month's time (well, near Tokyo). So it was beginning to look like I wouldn't be able to do more than give simple advice about Kyoto anyway. 

Again, Best of wishes to you in your new endeavor! 

 

Foreign Orchid. 

[Markdoc]

Thanks! Odds are pretty good we'll be in Japan in the next year to two: we go back to New Zealand every other year to catch up with friends and family, and almost always take a week's stopover along the way. Tokyo was a big hit last year, so I don't doubt we'll be back to see more of Japan.

 

I thought you decided you couldn't take the job in Tokyo - have you found a new lead?

 

cheers, Mark