Chasing shadows

Travellers of foreign lands will tell you your shadow is a most useful thing. It can tell you where north, south, east and west are, critical information for getting around.

While this works pretty well most of the time, it can be a bit confusing if you're not sure what you're doing. In Singapore, at 12 noon you won't have much of a shadow, but in Japan, you'd have a shadow that's pointing north. Similarly, your shadow would always be slightly northwards in Japan until near sundown or sunrise. I can't tell you how many extra kilometres I've walked because of this. And the other thing is that this doesn't work at all at night.

Luckily, the 100 Yen shop comes to the rescue and I am now the owner of something I should have bought ages ago: a compass.