SARS collector's cards and other trophies of travel

It has been a very odd and eventful past three weeks, taking me from Wichita to Memphis to Los Angeles to Taipei to Bangkok to Tokyo to Sendai, then back to Tokyo and Bangkok and on to Ranong -- and the whole time I've been trapped in an orbit of TV dispatches coming out of Iraq. I left Wichita the day after the coalition bombing started, and arrived in Ranong the day before the statue of Saddam was pulled down in Baghdad's Paradise Square. Hence, it feels as if, for the past three weeks, I have been traveling in more than one dimension at once. I started to write a blog entry about this (entitled "This War is the O.J. Chase"), but I got so carried away that I think I will submit the resulting essay to the magazine market. Whether there will be any takers for this unorthodox rant remains to be seen -- but such is the life of the freelancer.

In the meantime, I'll share this rather surreal declaration that comes from a yellow slip of paper that was shoved into my hands at Japan's Narita Airport:

"During your stay abroad you may be exposed to dangerous infections diseases without your knowledge. If you should develop, therefore, any symptom such as fever, abnormal bleeding, diarrhea or jaundice within twenty-one (21) days after arriving in this country, you are kindly requested to consult a physician, for the sake of your health, showing him this card."

You've gotta love travel life in the SARS age. I particularly enjoyed the detail requesting that you show the warning card to a physician when you get sick -- as if that would save him the task of actually diagnosing what was wrong with you. Perhaps one day all diseases will come with their own collector's cards