Hiroko's Kyoto trip — VisNote
Ten days, four cities, one notebook that survived the jet lag.
Hiroko went to Kyoto with a notebook and a phone and a suspicion that photos alone weren’t going to cut it.
She’d just come back from a trip to Seoul where her camera roll looked like a slot machine — hundreds of near-duplicates, nothing labelled, nothing findable. “I could not tell you what I ate on day five,” she said. “I had six pictures of it.”
What she did differently
She set VisNote to auto-tag location and manually added one-line notes every time she stopped. Not every photo. Every stop. A temple, a tea shop, a bench. Twenty-eight entries over ten days.
The train-home test
The real test was the shinkansen back. She opened the Kyoto map and tapped each dot. Every entry had enough hooks — the location, the one line, the single chosen photo — to pull the whole afternoon back.
“That’s the point, right?” she said. “Not to have been there. To have gotten there, and come back with it.”
"I stopped trying to 'document' and just started noticing. The notebook kept up."