:: travellingcari.com ::

Thanks – got it – that is a very fine, thoughtful review; would you please let the reviewer know how much it is appreciated? The author Lesley Thomas was very gratified to read it, and would like to tell her that she is working on another book about women in Lapp and ancient Norse cultures.

E-mails like this are part of why I love doing the review for Front Street Press. Although Far Eastern Press seems to be a bit bigger than Golden Quill Press/The Write Source was when I worked with them on Tell it to the Future, there’s just *something* about working with small publishers. I really look forward to reading more of the author’s work. I know even less about Lapp and ancient Norse cultures than I did about Inupiaq culture, but I look forward to the book. As I said when I first mentioned this book, it’s interesting how books, fiction or not, can get you interested in new cultures.

I found the blog via one of my usual haunts, in my All stars but it was the title: What you should know about getting a tattoo on the road that caught my attention.
Often, when travelling people make decisions which they wouldn’t usually do in their normal life back home.

Ordinarily, I’d say that was a good thing, that it’s one of the good things to do while travelling, but it really made me think about the tattoo issue. When I was in Fiji I met a lot of travelers headed ‘the other way’ aka back to the US after a semester or so in Australia or New Zealand and many had the Southern Cross tatooed on their feet. Now I’m totally for “whatever floats your boat” but it seemed there was a fair degree of herd mentality going on.

I wavered before getting my tattoo in Japan, not because I was concerned about wanting it when I got home-it was a tattoo I’d been talking about for years-but because I knew a tattoo could cause some problems while in Japan. In the end, I had my tat done here 5+ years ago and I’ve never regretted it for a second. It’s a subtle souvenir of Japan: Round I. And I was able to use onsens in Kyoto and at Fuji-san without any issue.

At other times on other trips I contemplated other tattoos. I even had the artwork done for one but didn’t have it done because I was sunburned. By the time I was no longer sunburned, I kind of forgot about it. There’s still one I’m contemplating, but if I end up getting it, it will probably be done here. We’ll see.