Stephen Fry's Gossiping Heads

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It has been a long long time - Boston and New York 2022

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I am sitting in a coffee shop in the South End of Boston (Tremont Street), about 2 minutes’ walk from my old apartment on Worcester Square. I lived here for almost 2 years from November 2000 and have some good memories. I have not been back for 16 years.  A lot has changed, a lot has not. The ride to the hotel was much the same although main roads in Boston are almost all underground so you don't see daylight for quite some time and there is nothing fun about sitting in a traffic jam for 30 minutes underground.   I am staying in the Beacon Hill area of the city and it is a cute mix of Victorian era town houses and cobbled streets bookended by the government district and the massive Massachusetts General Hospital. I was supposed to be here with a friend who lives in Quebec but due to him being forgetful etc. he forgot the document he needed to enter the USA so I am now doing this 5 day, 4 night trip on my own, not a total disaster but a very different holiday dynamic....
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I recently spent 11 days in Japan and this is a compilation of my thoughts over those 11 days. Days 1 and 2 So my first question about Japan is why is it the land of the rising sun, why does Japan have the monopoly on rising suns? It rises everywhere right? So my arrival into the city centre could have been better, I took the express Metro line not the local and ended up in NoIdeaWhereIamI aka Nihonbashi and had to go back on my self and the exit that google maps said I needed didn't exist so I wandered around Ginza trying to find my hotel and find road signs (they are impossible to see). So after landing at Haneda at 520pm, I got to my hotel at 8pm. Room is lovely but small and was once a smoking room so it smells like my grandad's house, on the upside, I am 5 minutes walk from the largest Uniqlo store in the world and the hotel has an amazing breakfast buffet, fish for breakfast indeed! Ginza is the area with all the posh shops, streets and streets of it, the S...
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