I'll be glad when tomorrow rolls around and I can just do a picture dump of cosplayers from the convention...

But, today, I don't have that luxury, so I'll just ramble a bit.

International travel is something that hasn't ever intrigued me much, save for two destinations. The first is a rather obvious trip to Japan. It's impossible to say that the Oriental archipelago hasn't affected my life and attitude in some way, so a trip there to see the source of it all is certainly in order. My two oldest brothers and myself are planning on fulfilling this order sometime next year.

The second place that I'd love to visit you probably wouldn't guess... unless you're one of the people whom I've told and subsequently think that I'm crazy for even thinking this. That place would be Prypiat, Ukraine - the city inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

I cannot explain why I find the whole story around the Chernobyl disaster so intriguing. Part of it is because I find nuclear power in itself utterly fascinating. I recall when the Great East Japan Earthquake broke out last year and Fukushima Daiichi began its series of cascading failures, I religiously checked the IAEA website for new information several times a day hungry for more information on what was happening. I did that for a solid two months, hanging on to every word mentioned about the core temperatures, water levels, radiation spread, and so forth. Maybe I just have an interest in nuclear disaster...

But, I digress.

Yes, the Chernobyl disaster is something that I've been interested in for a very long time. I remember reading again and again a National Geographic article on it when I was around 11 or 12. They had aerial pictures of the core shortly after the explosion, pictures of reactor 4 before the sarcophagus went up, cut away diagrams of the melted reactor material oozing into the basement. It's amazingly fascinating stuff. So, when a fellow redditor posted images of his tour, all those feelings of intrigue were dredged up again. Plus, Prypiat is now open for tours.

Granted, this is a tour of the ghost town outside of the plant rather than a tour of the plant itself (which I would prefer and then get cancer for having done), but that in and of itself would be pretty awesome, if not entirely creepy. Perhaps I can realize this dream in 2014 or beyond.

Unless I have a girlfriend or something...