Fourth Form of Madness

There is a saying in my family when travelling….”Don’t pack more than you can carry”.  I have never been good at this.  I have travelled a lot but unfortunately I am one of those travellers that has never been able to shake the urge to pack everything I own.   Anyway I changed the saying to “Don’t pack more than your husband can carry” long ago and lucky for me my husband has been olympic weight lifting training for the past couple of years and I am happy to say he has been lifting some personal bests on this trip when it comes to lugging my backpack around.  I get the way better deal of being responsible for his waifer thin backpack.  The last time my hubby came to Japan for a 5 week holiday he came with luggage that was allowed on as carry-on as it was so light and half of the luggage consisted of his jiu-jitsui gi.  I don’t know how he does it but clearly the two of us are from two different worlds.

This was never so apparent as the other day when we visited a Kyoto film studio park (a little like the Japanese equivalent of Universal studios).  I know it is very tacky and I am not quite sure why I wanted to go see this studio as usually temples, shrines and tea ceremonies are more my speed.  But there we were trundling along the deserted streets of studio sets of pseudo Edo towns.  It was kind of eerie being the only ones there, like we were the only ones that survived the end of the world (yes you can tell I was having fun with this in my imagination can’t you).

Anyway after spending the first 15 minutes getting dressed up as a geisha for a holiday happy snap which seemed to provide my husband with plenty to laugh about for the remainder of the day, I spied a haunted house to visit.  I don’t know if you are the same, but sometimes I do things that make no sense.  This was one of them.  I am not really one for ghosts or haunted houses or for asking to be voluntary scared for that matter, life can do that quite nicely by itself often on an involuntary basis.  But for some reason I wanted to go into house.   I breezed over the disclaimer that they got us to read (and in English which was impressive) without giving it a second thought ….. and without even noticing that it had words to the effect that once you have entered you can’t come out the way you have gone in.

It wasn’t until the door behind me snapped shut and my husband and I were alone in a dark, small room with yet another disclaimer playing on a tv set up on the wall that I wished I had payed a tinsy winsy bit more attention to the disclaimer or given a smidge more of a thought to where I was going into.  It was here in the dark, hot, airless small room that I suddenly remembered something else that had been happening to me since I landed in Japan – bouts of claustrophobia.  It started the first night in our hotel room, the sudden overwhelming fear and crushing angst that is claustrophobia.  I am one that usually has even steady breath, so to suddenly feel like you can’t breath is an almost unbearable situation.  To be fair I suffered from a few bouts of this back in my  teenage years but I haven’t had it for so long I was taken by surprised when suddenly it was back – fabulous!  This time, however, I at least have yoga breathing I could focus on in the midst of a bout and I really think this helps.

So there I was with the door rolling shut behind me and a full on bout of claustrophobic fear rolling over me.  It’s fair to say I lost it as it first came on but then that tidal wave of fear is so strong it would be hard not to lose it in the first few disorientating seconds of it.  Every sense in my body screamed “Get me out of here” as I proceeded to knock on the door that had just closed behind me and scream something to that effect.  Hubby, bless him, had started to look up the phrase for claustrophobic attack on his Japanese iphone app but the haunted house operators wouldn’t budge, they would not open the door to the tiny room to let us out.  But they did very helpfully, speak to us in english over the microphone into the tiny room saying “Keep moving forward” and opened the door that led into the depths of the haunted house.

So there we are, me trying not to completely go insane with fear whilst focusing on my breathing and with hubby yelling out something in Japanese whilst banging on the door whilst a monotone voice announced over our heads “Keep moving forward”.  I couldn’t make up stuff this good if I tried!  It was then it happened.  I became acutely aware I was watching this fear, this situation, just sitting back and observing and in that instance it became really, really funny and I felt it the fear recede out of me like a wave goes back out to sea and I turned to my husband and said “oh well, we may as well go ahead as they aren’t going to change their minds”.  So there we were making out way through the pseudo haunted house with the occasionally person jumping out and trying to scare us with me laughing to myself the whole way thinking “this is nothing compared to what I just went through”.

The whole situation got a whole lot funnier when we got outside and realised that the word that hubby had been shouting out in Japanese to the haunted house operators loosely translated as “she is making a big deal out of nothing, is fidgety and restless” with a side note at the bottom that sometimes it could also mean claustrophobic!  We couldn’t stop laughing over that one for quite some time.  I got to say, hubby was a rock in this situation.  Even though he must struggle with how I was so filled with fear just standing in a room when he is someone that choses to throw themselves out of airplanes and to be choked out and restricted of air on a regular basis through jiu-jitsui. He gracefully allowed me my space to deal with my own fear (which on my part may have been not so gracefully).

There is another well known saying in our household “It isn’t a holiday until hubby gets sick”.  Every holiday we have gone on usually involves some drastic form of food poisoning wiping my husband out for a few days (or in the case of Nepal – a few weeks).  I have now added a new saying to our repertoire thanks to this last event and another close kidnapping caper that happened in France a few years back — “It ain’t a holiday until I have lost it”….. well folks I am happy to declare this officially a holiday………