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Hai Chiiiiiizu take 304
Miyako san and Chihiro outside the JR office in Narita, yet again we say hai ChhiiiiiizuKonnicha wa tomodachi to watashi no kazoku! Hello to friends and family
Before proceeding I wish to apolgise in advance for several things :
1. this keyboard is quite obviously foreign and defaults to traditional japanese script when i am not looking
which is virtually never as i am a opeless typist , hey that last mistake sounds like somethign from Coro street
2. Like China in 2007,the shift key amongst others has depressing issues, in that it is always depressed and never getting the opportunity to bounce back in to a positive relationship with the fellow keys
3. The room is swaying, and I am pretty certain that this is not the shoochu taking effect, more on this later...
4. The above all amount to poor punctuation and grammar, difficulty in conveying messages and making it hard for the reader to understand, and easier to potentially switch off, which I really dont want you to as you need to know that this country is just amazing, spiritual, bustling, business like and beautiful all at once...
Before starting this trip I deceided to reflect on how I did the China and Vietanm blogs so as
two wide mouth frogs
pauline:s wide mouth frog joke went a little wrong not to bore the pants of you all. This consisted of reading the blogs and going through all my travel photos. Finally I realised that geez I went on a heluva lot about toilets. And my altercations with officialdom. But to be fair, now being back in Japan, I see how intrepid that part of the world was for me, and how immensly civilised this place is in comparison. This trip has been a real build up...all I lived on last week was fresh air, adrenalin from exercise and other things, and food, with a virtual non existence of sleep. I cannot recall being so incredible excitied to go on holiday, and a big part of this is the people I have planned to meet up with and the time since we last saw eachother.
So I shall start with arriving....
The plane trip on AirNZ went very quickly, taking 11 hrs with minor issue with my ears no decongesting as we descended, painful but helped no end by some eucalyptus given to me by a lovely hostess. I had it all as far as plane trips go! - soem drama with a rude overweight older male hostess,
miyako, ayumu and pauline san
at grandamas place after ayumus soccer practice who needed a lesson in customer service and how not to greet passengers who requested something, a female hostess that loudly stated the inadequacies of her team including digs at this colleague, some great conversation with Japanese who had excellent English, good tunes, good sleep, okay food. The lady sat next to me had just spent 3 weeks in Botany Downs and NZ, including homestaying with an indian family of university teachers, and just loved NZ, but then again dont they all! She did help me however, and felt it her duty to correct my very rusty grammar. I am surprising myself with the amount of vocab mainly that I can retrieve from deep within the recesses of my language brain of Mrs Hook and Mr Lamberts teaching at Long bay College....plus a jisho always comes in handy!
When i arrived it was an immense occasion, once I had trawled the airport for one hour clearing cutsoms, finding my almost lost baggage and declaring myself lost property to be found a few minutes later by Chihiro san and Miyako san, her youngest child and daughter. It was an intense embrace, very teary and I felt it wouldn't end in
her vice like grasp. 16 yrs ago Chihiro stayed with my family and I, and we have kept in touch ever since through all stages of our lives. There are issues for her living situation I believe, but apart from saying to me she is now a single Mum bringing up two kids on her second marriage break up, I do not want to delve any more, and it would be rude to I think. I really feel sorry and sad, but she does have a lot of support from her Mum I believe.
So some photos of the past 2 days which feel like 10!
Can you tell which one of us got sleep? Correct answer none, we were all hyper and feeling very much TSUKARETA this morning at 5 am or 8am NZ time after 3-4 hrs sleep, a tick tock clock and traffic sounds all night, alhtough I have to say on a VERY COMFORTABLE floor! It made me laugh that Chihiro apologises for me having to sleep on tatami and eat WASHOKU, which is japanese cuisine. Well why the heck am I here????
To Nagasaki and the sunny clime of Kyuushuu...
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