Charlie

If you get tired of the tempo of Tokyo and feel you would like to get out of the city, you might enjoy a day trip to Nikko.

I agree with the Philadelphia to New York/Osaka to Tokyo comparison. (Note: I have lived in both Philadelphia and New York, and spent time in both Osaka and Tokyo.)

🤔😁

When I was a senior in high school, my best friend and I went to Vermont for an admissions interview at Middlebury College, and stayed at an old inn in the town the night before. The john was out in the common hallway, but there was a sink in the bedroom. During the night, I had to piss, but I didn't want to get dressed to go down the hall, so I pissed in the sink. It was the most transgressive act I had ever performed up till that time in my life, and it felt so liberating.

Ooo! '58 Buick Super.

I have usually owned Mercedes since 1985 (my previous one had 111K miles on it when we finally traded it in after having driven it in 48 states and Canada) , but our second car at the moment is a base model Kia Soul, which I love as a daily driver around town, but I'm still keeping the M-B for longer trips.

Ah! World Gym in Palm Springs (I used to be a member).

I never got to the point of being ready for a recital.

They say they are based in London, the only spoken language they list is English (😄! did you read their text?), and most of their hashtags are in Portuguese. They have been on RM for four months, and have only two reviews. Approach with care.

I did a lot of volunteer work during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, and I was getting burned out. I decided I needed a new hobby, so I took up something I had always wanted to do, which was play the piano. I was in my late 40s, had no experience and couldn't even read music, but hired a teacher who lived near me, who was recommended by a friend. She was an elderly graduate of the Curtis Institute, and she gave lessons in her home, so I had to buy my own piano to practice at my home. She was a delightful personality; we chatted a lot, and I discovered that she had been the favorite pupil of Isabella Vengerova, whose own piano teacher had been Johannes Brahms! One day she had to cancel our lesson because she was having lunch with her old friend Lenny, who was visiting--it turned out to be Leonard Bernstein. My interest was classical music, but after two years of lessons, I could barely manage a short and simple piece by Mozart, and it was time to admit to myself that my goals had been far too ambitious. I was about to go off to Czechoslovakia for a one year sabbatical, which was an ideal excuse to use for stopping my lessons with Bella, and shortly after I returned, I had new responsibilities which were an excuse not to resume them. I would sit down occasionally to practice at home after that, but my heart wasn't in it any longer, once I realized that I would never be able to play for my own entertainment. I sold the piano before we moved to California. During the pandemic, I sometimes wished I had the piano back, so I could use the empty hours at home to try to practice again, but I knew that was really just foolish day-dreaming.

My password for this site. (Hooboy gave it to me 20 years ago, and I have hardly ever logged out.)

Not phony in the sense of a phony ad, but out-of-character linguistically for the ad. Note how Epigonos' attention was caught primarily by that one word. Changing the wording eliminated the the way the vocabulary-lesson Greek term seemed out of place.

Because I would not go to a country where they didn't recognize our legal relationship, in case there were a situation such as a medical emergency in which I needed to make decisions for my spouse. The fact that we have already been to Russia is irrelevant.

My partner and I used to travel to countries which are not gay friendly, like Russia, but now that we are legally married and I am basically his caregiver, I would not go to a country which would not recognize that relationship and treat it appropriately.

In his ad, he has changed "plethora" to "wide range" (but didn't correct the missing verb). I suspect he used a thesaurus to write the original ad text, and someone pointed out to him that "plethora" sounded phony.

A lot to love there. (BTW, I have played with guys that size, and they are often surprisingly nimble.)

My orgasms are such non-events nowadays that I don't think there is anything I would give up in order to continue having them. There are other things than orgasms that you could offer me which I might be willing to exchange for some time at the end of my life.

When a close friend moved across country, he took everything that he was afraid could be lost, stolen or damaged by movers. He ended up renting a U-Haul truck, but since he didn't drive, I drove the truck with the two of us in the cab, and the back filled with favorite clothes, photos (you know, those things that one used to take with a film camera), autographed books, LP records, paintings, and all those sentimental possessions that are useless but you can't get rid of, like Japanese kimonos that you brought home from Kyoto, or that bottle of Becherovka that your students in Czechoslovakia gave you, or that china tea set that belonged to your grandmother, etc. It was great fun for me, because we took twelve days to drive from coast to coast, and I got to see parts of the country that I had never seen before (we spent two days driving around in Yellowstone in the truck), and I will probably never see again, like the Amana colony in Iowa, and the Corn Palace in South Dakota.

Years ago I was team-teaching a humanities course with an older female colleague. Part of my task was to provide appropriate music from 19th century composers, so one day I brought a recording of the "Liebestod" to play for the class. As we were listening, I saw my colleague become redder and redder in the face. After class was dismissed, I asked her if she was OK; she said, "That woman was having a sexual climax!"

The only cruises I have ever taken were from New York to Bermuda and back, and a ten day windjammer cruise in the Leeward Islands, and although I enjoyed them, each time I was very happy to get back home. I can't imagine being stuck on a ship for nine months. Considering that the majority of people on such a cruise are probably elderly, how do they manage their regular medications (an extra trunk?)? What happens if you become ill or injured halfway around the world? What if there is some emergency back home that you need to attend to? How easy is it to maintain communications with family/banks, etc., back home? (What if you lose/break your phone or iPad?) Of course, these are problems that one may face on any kind of trip, but they seem magnified when you are essentially living on a vessel on the ocean far from home, and are committed to being there for many months.

We got the Pfizer booster on Tuesday, more than seven months after the first two. We had no noticeable reactions to the first two. Yesterday I had some muscle pain in my back, flu-like, but it's gone today. Soreness in the arm was gone within hours after the jab. Unlike the hassle of trying to get the first two shots back in February and March, this time I just called the nearest Walgreen's and got an appointment for both of us to get the shot an hour later.

Hmm...the next time I try to identify scat on a trail....

This map looked so different when I started traveling internationally a half century ago, that I probably wouldn't have gone anywhere if I had eliminated places where gay sex was illegal--it was illegal here in the US, where I was born and lived then! I have never been to a brown country, but I have been to a few of the orange ones (e.g., Morocco and Malaysia), and I would probably go back to them. On the whole, however, the countries where gays are seriously persecuted are ones where I probably wouldn't have been interested in traveling anyway.

...als man sagt in Berlin. (BTW, you have a typo there)

When we moved from Pennsylvania to California, we took a week to do the drive, partly because we had our cat with us. He was a very quiet, easygoing old housecat (14 years), but you don't want a cat loose in the car. He stayed in his crate on the back seat, but we had to stop regularly to give him a chance to move around in the car and avail himself of the litter box that was on the floor of the back seat; we brought enough fresh litter and bags to dispose of the litter each day, because we didn't want to be driving in an enclosed vehicle with an unchanged litter box day after day. Feed him what he is used to at his regular times. Bring enough bottled water, because you don't want to keep giving him water from new local sources all the time, which might upset his digestive system. If you stay overnight anywhere along the way, make sure he can't get out of the motel room, and try not to leave him alone in the room, even if it means bringing your own food or getting fast food take-out to eat in the room or the car. Check to make sure the room doesn't have a bed so low to the floor that he can get out and hide under it when it's time to leave. If he has his own bed, bring it with you. Although we arrived two weeks before our furniture, there were chaises longues outside by the pool; we brought them inside and slept on them in sleeping bags which we brought with us. If you are not used to sleeping in a sleeping bag, google the nearest sporting goods store to your new residence and buy an inflatable mattress when you arrive. If you don't have a sleeping bag, remember that you will need at least a blanket and a pillow on that inflatable mattress. That tv may not work for entertainment until you can get a hook-up, so bring a good book.