03/27/2026 JPBT Day 5 : Gifted Strangers

We woke to a dense fog and soaked tent. First planned stop was a vending machine to get a cold coffee. We both agreed that we like the European coffee culture better.

We made a trip to another post office, hoping that maybe we could send home the drone and cookwear. The woman had me sit in a chair while she and the rest of the staff scuttled about - digging through file cabinets and assembling portfolios of paper. It looked like they were preparing for a court case on Perry Mason. Finally, she came to my chair and knelt down besides me and explained that the USA would probably confiscate my package because of the drone. I asked if we could send it anyway, and she reluctantly said “we could”, but they would not be responsible for the postage. That was enough to scare me out of sending it home; I could give it to someone here, and have the same end result (no drone) when I got home… but an extra $50 of postage still in my pocket.

Finding trash cans and enough Food calories continues to be an issue. I thought I was joking the other day when I said that there are more calories in the packaging - but this morning i lit à fire to dispose of the plastic… and it took 30 minutes before the trash burned out! That’s a lot of energy!

We have been spending a ton on food. The food seems inexpensive; a dollar here, two dollars there.. but a dollar buys me enough calories to pedal 800 meters. How can this gas-hog of a body get more efficient? No wonder it was a Japanese company that popularized the Prius hybrid.

We rode up the mountain, and I had a plan: I’d use a seaweed rice ball to get up the hill; I calculated it would be 2 hours of straight pedaling, so I took one unit of insulin and ate the entire rice ball.

About 1/3 of the way up, though, the road was closed, and there was a schedule. We had just missed the last opening by a few minutes. It wouldn’t be open for an hour! Suddenly I realized I was in a bit of a pickle (à sweet pickle, not a dill one).

I observed that the body of a type 1 diabetic is a little like a nuclear reactor. Once you start the fission, you can’t just flip it off. You have three choices:
1. Use the energy. Ride the bike. This is the ideal outcome - fuel in, watts out, today’s original plan.
2. Insert the control rods. In reactor terms, this slows the reaction - but it takes time, and the core keeps burning hot while it winds down. In my terms, that means an insulin injection. Insulin takes about an hour to work. So the “reactor” would be running dangerously hot for an hour as we waited… and then shutting down right when I needed energy again. Not ideal.
3. Shunt the heat into the cooling system - basically boil water, waste the energy, keep the core from melting. This is what I did. I jogged up and down the hill looking like a goofy Lycra-clad lad, burning the incoming sugar before my blood glucose could go critical. If I’d just stood there, I’d have hit 400 in minutes.

When the road opened, we were primed to ride, and after another 1/3 of the way up, we met two guys in a truck heading down. We did some conversion, and it turned out that they were warning us of more construction ahead - but this time there was a go-around. The driver hopped out and handed us a bag of tiny oranges and a stack of rice balls - no explanation, no expectation, just a big grin and a bow before driving off. That’s the kind of kindness that doesn’t need a common language.

We are getting a lot of opportunities to practice saying ‘thank you.’ Which is ironic, because Duolingo (currently our Japanese sensei) hasn’t taught us “Thank you” yet, but it does seem to think we urgently need to know how to say, “I am Brazilian.”

A couple hours later, we made it to a town called “Shiiba.” We had just bought our groceries, and were packing outside when a man came to give us some more of those fish-tube things that Janet thought were breadsticks the other day. We thanked him and bowed - more food for me because Janet is living on bread and rice, and I’m living on nuts, dried fish, sliced pig tongues, packaged duck fat, seaweed, kimchi, and…. fish-tubes… the last item continuing to enter my life despite the fact that I have never once bought them.