blueberries, or perhaps more accurately billberries, as they are called in North America to distinguish them from their southern, bush-growing siblings, come in various forms.
before I left on this trip, I considered buying dried packets of blueberry flour as gifts, as they are both in and of itself when it comes to stuff you can only find in alepa, as well as being fantastically portable. I forgot, so instead I packed some alepa- and moomin-totebags. the Finnish flag-carrier famously adopted a line of distributing complimentary blueberry juice to their customers a few years ago. when arriving at Haneda airport in Tokyo, and observing the cutest pair of sniffing dogs – probably grandson and grandfather – at work to find undeclared fresh fruit and veg together with impeccably dressed customs officers, I remembered that I had a small tupperware of blueberries (this time the southern bushy kind) in a side pocket of my backpack. Luckily the pack was still on the way to being delivered to the conveyor, and once I saw it thump on the line, I waited for it to come to the far end where I was standing, while the dogs and god-owners went the other way. I grabbed by pack from the conveyor, quickly pocketed the box of blueberries checking to see if I had collected any eyes on me, and promptly marched to the toilet to eat a box of blueberries in one sitting. The original plan was to fly to Narita airport just outside of Tokyo, and then transfer to Haneda across town to make it to my connecting flight to Fukuoka. My flight from Helsinki was overbooked, and being flexible for timing anyway on this trip as I was, I volunteered to be replaced. Once I had gone through security and arrived at the gate, the matter was as complicated as booking me on a flight to Haneda instead of Narita, leaving ten minutes later and from across the corridor from where we were, and removing all the hassle from the correspondence. I'm writing this five minutes to midnight local time in Fukuoka, after having travelled for just about 24 hours to get here. It takes me longer to get to Hamburg. At Haneda airport I had the time to have lunch at one of the ramen places they have inconspicuously places at the corner of the main hall of the Domestic terminal. I realised I had my wallet in my coat pocket and thus already checked in and on the way to the hold. Luckily I still had some battery left on my phone from filling entry forms and dispensing battery time in making QR-codes brighter. A simple tap on a ticket machine in front of the ramen-joint, and I was waved to sit down at the counter by a waiter with his back towards me. He must've heard my approaching rustling. I observed the Haneda ramen joint staff closely, as I had nothing else to do, and they were incredibly light in all their movements and all their utterances. They sung - holding on to the last vowel of the sentence to either welcome customers or to bid them farewell long enough for it to settle as a key for a melodic line. It wasn't hard to listen to their speech as music. Their gestures of welcome and service were completely independent of the direction their face was pointing. They could fill glasses of cold tea in the corner, facing what they were doing, and simultaneously showing an empty seat for a new customer to settle into. I will be on this trip for 25 days, aiming to update on here for 25mins a day. I will be in Fukuoka until Sunday, when I'm planning to go down to the island of Yakushima.
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lauri supponen /composer/
25 minutes of writing observations about travel, sound and contemporary music Archives
July 2023
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