With stops in Lon­don, Köln, München, and Tokyo, my two week busi­ness trip went by in a blur.

The trip was good from busi­ness stand­point and I was lucky to be able to see good friends in all three coun­tries, but boy am I thank­ful to be back home. Two weeks on the road is about my limit for a work-related trip.

There’s a statue out­side of Shibuya sta­tion ded­i­cated to Hachiko, the leg­endary Akita who faith­fully waited for her owner every night, even long after he passed away.

I didn’t think much about it until my flight in April from SFO to NRT was in the air, but I spent almost ever other sum­mer in Japan when I was grow­ing up. After 8 years away (far too long in ret­ro­spect), would it still feel the same? Had the long eco­nomic malaise sapped the coun­try of its vitality?

I was happy to see that while much of the urban land­scape of Tokyo had changed—in par­tic­u­lar, mega-projects like Rop­pongi Hills, Tokyo Mid­town, and Omote­sando Hills were all new to me—the essen­tial char­ac­ter of place hadn’t. The dynamic energy, fre­netic pace, and fan­tas­tic food were still there, just enhanced by the con­tin­ued organic evo­lu­tion of the city.

And that’s what I like most about the place, the jar­ring dis­con­ti­nu­ity—no doubt a legacy of the urban plan­ning done by war­lords from cen­turies past. Unlike other cities, Tokyo jux­ta­poses new and old, with seem­ingly lit­tle con­cern for con­ti­nu­ity. Per­haps it’s wabi-sabi writ large. Regard­less, I’m look­ing for­ward to going back in June—and much more in the future. Like Hachiko, Japan waits patiently for me to return.

You know your trip to Seat­tle is com­plete when…

…you spot Star­bucks chair­man and CEO Howard Schultz just out­side the first Star­bucks store on Pike Place.

Even though I was in Lon­don for busi­ness, I did get a chance to indulge in some pho­tog­ra­phy one night before head­ing off to din­ner. Check out this set to see the results.

On a camera-nerd note, the Ricoh GR Dig­i­tal II makes for a pretty nice range-finder-like dig­i­tal cam­era. The high ISO grain is fairly pleas­ing and the range of man­ual con­trol is rar­ity on a dig­i­tal cam­era this small. It’s emi­nently pocket-able and will be a nice side arm com­ple­ment to my even­tual replace­ment dig­i­tal SLR.

Some ran­dom thoughts from my trip last week to Munich and London:

• Flughafen München is the clean­est and qui­etest air­port that I’ve been through in recent years. It’s a strik­ing con­trast (and a bit eerie) to sprawl­ing com­plexes like LAX or or LHR.
• Cor­po­rate rival­ries play out in inter­est­ing ways. Just after the giant BMW grille in the bag­gage claim, there’s an Audi S5 on dis­play right by the exit and enor­mous Audi ban­ners in the out­door square of the air­port. Seems like a bold move given that Munich is BMW’s world headquarters.
• Bread is gen­er­ally very good in Ger­many. I would eat brötchen all the time if I could get some­thing com­pa­ra­ble here in California.
• There’s noth­ing like the sense of déjà vu that you get when you return to a city that you were last in years ear­lier. In my case, strolling down Kaufin­ger­straße and end­ing up in Marien­platz brought back a flood of mem­o­ries from a trip to Munich a decade ago.
• The street cars in Munich are Prius-sneaking-up-on-pedestrians quiet. The N-Judah that runs by my flat in San Fran­cisco sounds like a stam­ped­ing herd of buf­falo by comparison.
• Lon­don Heathrow, unlike the Inter­net, really is a series of tubes. Catch­ing a con­nect­ing flight at LHR involves a series of mov­ing walk­ways con­nect­ing a seem­ingly end­less sprawl of terminals.
• The EmPower power out­lets built in to many air­plane seats seems rather cus­tomer unfriendly. Is there actu­ally a good tech­ni­cal rea­son for not pro­vid­ing stan­dard AC out­lets in-seat instead?

Giant kidney-shaped grill and roundrel on the wall in the bag­gage claim?

I must be in Munich.