Back to (Almost) Normal

Life has pretty quickly fallen back to almost normal.

There was no market on Saturday and we didn't need anything at the farm shops, so Lindsey and I went out to the Wendouree shopping centre and just had a potter round. I bought some hair scrunchies in The Reject Shop, which may surprise those of you who know that I usually keep my hair quite short. When we were at the Miyako Resort in Japan they provided yukatas  for the guests to wear. Kaori wore hers and looked beautiful. They also provided elasticated sleeve bands to stop the sleeves falling into your soup or whatever. I do not have a Yukata, as such, but I do have a similar style summer dressing gown, plus my winter dressing gown has long sleeves and I struggle to keep them out of the sink or the frying pan or many other things. The scrunchies are a good size for what I wanted and are working perfectly. Also, $3 for six scrunchies at the Reject Shop is considerably cheaper than buying actual, proper sleeve garters!

I was out at Macedon on Sunday for lunch with The Sunday Lunchers. Chris and John put on a lovely lunch with prawn salad, a lemon and chicken bake and lemon steamed pudding. The food was delicious and the company entertaining. It was a good afternoon. The sun even shone, which was slightly surprising. After a hot and dry Saturday, Sunday was cooler, greyer and wetter. It was a pleasure to have the sun come out during the afternoon.

I say that life is almost back to normal. I had lunch with Freyja on Friday in a fairly new Korean place at work, and it was lovely. We will go there again. I do not normally go out for lunch on work days. I am picking up some extra Japanese lessons because I didn't do any while I was in Japan and I have a whole load to catch up. I am working on Wednesday and Thursday this week, rather than Wednesday and Friday. I have various deliveries due. In a normal week I do not have to think about what I'm doing, when and where. This week I am keeping a close eye on what I'm supposed to be doing and when!

In amongst everything else, I have planted some new herbs seedlings. Freyja and Simon gave me another herb planter so I have one with parsley, and one with thyme and oregano. One teeny, tiny step towards getting my gardens organised!!!

Home

So the blog got me to the Osaka airport and there it appeared to abandon me 😆

I did, in fact, get home.

I had a remarkably nice, Japanese style roast beef and salad plate in an airport cafe before heading through checkin, security and immigration.

The flight back to Brisbane was largely uneventful, apart from us sitting in our seats on the plane for over an hour before we left. We were, apparently, waiting for the official engineer's departure paperwork. The pilot said he had no idea what the hold up was. There was nothing wrong with the aircraft but we couldn't leave without the paperwork.

I had a bit of a wait in Brisbane for the next flight so had some brunch and a cup of coffee while I was waiting.  I happened to be in the airport at 11:00 on the 11th of November and was slightly surprised that we were asked to observe a minute's silence (I hadn't really noticed the date) and the airport came to a standstill. Even people who may not have known why we were observing a silence stood still and quiet. And then we all moved on again.

I had plenty of time in Melbourne to make the coach back to Ballarat and then took a taxi back to my place, where things were more or less as I had left them three weeks earlier.

The cats were pleased to see me, and even more pleased to get fed, although I had had someone come in almost every day while I was away, sometimes staying for a night or three.

I've made it back to work.

I have established a (small) version of Austin and Kaori's snack cupboard. Theirs doesn't just have snacks and I do have a proper pantry, but I also have a cupboard in one of my dressers which didn't have much in it. It now has some Japanese snacks and on the rare-ish occasion when I buy Australian snacks, they can go in there too.

Now I need to turn my attention to the gardens. I need to get the summer and autumn veg seedlings in and I really, really need to weed the garden beds and the patio. This may not happen today. The forecast is for 30d in Ballarat which is a touch too hot for planting out seedlings and possibly a bit too hot for vigorous weeding

Some of the seedlings waiting
for their new homes

Last few days in Japan

I was Home Alone on Thursday. I wandered across to the Lawsons convenience store for supplies for lunch and then went for a gentle amble around the local area

This is, allegedly, the first beagle
cafe in Japan
Sadly. it doesn't open until
the end of the month

 

On Friday Austin came home at lunchtime. We went back out to Costco. I may have re-opened my Costco membership, although I haven't activated it yet. I need to take my online card to a service point to get it authorised and it seemed a bit reckless to do that in Japan. It can wait until I am able to get to an Australian branch.

We went out to a mall for lunch on Saturday. Unfortunately, Kaori wasn't very well so didn't enjoy the day much.

This just has to be an Aussie Santa
and you would hope it is Boxing Day
otherwise a lot of children will be very disappointed!

Kaori was not well enough to join us for dinner on Saturday evening. Austin, Tatsuki and I went to the Big Guy steak and burger joint

It was certainly tasty
Not sure how healthy it was!

This was probably quite healthy
Salad and corn soup

This was not
Triple cheese and bacon burger with 
mashed potato

and mushroom gravy

This was a tiny hotplate
for crisping the bacon
and cooking the middle of
the burger to your liking

Open salad bar
Tatsuki helped himself to orange slices
and broccoli 😀

(Some of these photos are Austin's)

And so we come to my final day for this trip

Austin and I took Tatsuki for his Sunday swimming lesson. Austin and I did not stay to watch it. We went to the nearby Donki. I wanted some KitKats and a strap for the new black bag I bought the other day when it was clear I had room in my suitcase for all the snacks and omiyage or my clothes, but not both. 

I love Don Quijote. I especially love Donpen

I have no real need for a humidifier, but I do fancy these

After swimming, we went for a final Coco Ichi curry

Corn soup
I may need to move to Japan just for
the corn soup

Tonkatsu curry
There was salad as well

And now I am at the airport, on my way home

Shinkansen from Gifu
to Kyoto

Hello Kitty from Kyoto
to the airport

Just waiting now for the first of two planes to take me home

Rokka-En

Lindsey went back to Australia on Tuesday, leaving Gifu just after lunch. Before she left, we went out to the Mall to collect her new glasses. Austin and I returned the rental car, Kaori picked us up and brought us home.

Kaori doesn't work on Wednesdays. Austin took the day off. Tatsuki went to school. It was a lovely day so Austin, Kaori and I went back towards the Aeon Mall we had had lunch in on Monday, and went to visit Rokka-En.

Rokka-En is an interesting large house that was designed by a British architect for a wealthy Japanese man and which was built in 1913. It has a large western section and a large-ish Japanese section and is surrounded by beautiful gardens. I would link you to the official website but it doesn't seem to have an English language version - which surprised me because all the information boards were in Japanese and English.

Austin and Kaori had never been and only knew about it because it was the setting for a film they had seen.

I know it was designed by a British architect, but the Western side of the house put me in mind more of American plantation houses. Not that I have ever been to the US but I have seen them in movies and TV shows.

We went back to the Mall we had been in on Monday for lunch, did a bit of gentle shopping in another shopping centre and then came home, arriving before Tatsuki got home from school.

Everyone is back at work and school today. I am Home Alone! I should probably have a shower and get dressed before the morning disappears right away

Ise Jingu

It's hard to say whether we were lucky or unlucky with the weather yesterday.  It was a glorious day, lovely and sunny, a pleasant temperature, excellent for exploring.

The only problem with that was that everyone else thought so too, and it was public holiday.

We had intended to visit Ise Jingu on Saturday but the weather was so awful that we deferred the visit to yesterday and went to the aquarium instead. 

We should have gone in the rain!

There was a queue all down the road, with at least an hour's wait to get into the car park. The place was packed.

We gave up.

Kaori, Tatsuki, Lindsey and I hopped out of the car and went to look at a little shopping street. Austin went off to park the car.

The little shopping street was also packed!

There were places where there were fewer people

We met Austin at a convenience store down by a parking area down along the river and made our way towards home, stopping at a shopping mall for lunch en route.

We had pizzas from the shop next door for dinner.

And now we have reached Lindsey's last day. She's heading back to Australia tonight, for a conference on the Gold Coast. I'm staying on until Sunday. We have a number of things to achieve before she heads off, the most important of which is to pick up the glasses she ordered last week.

Pedestrian underpasses are very decorative in Japan:

Spain Park

We were very lucky with the weather. Where Saturday had been wet, wet, wet, yesterday's weather was glorious.

We took the hotel shuttle bus to the theme park. We knew that the return shuttle wasn't until 4:10, but had been told that we could take a local bus to the station, from where the station to hotel shuttle departed every hour. We only discovered once we got to the theme park that on Sundays there isn't a bus until 3:50. There didn't seem to be much point catching that. We were stuck at the theme park until 4:10!!!

It was a little too long for us, but in fact it was a very good day.

The park is laid out in sections. Rides over there. Spanish cultural stuff over there. Shows, exhibitions and a parade here in the main square. Eating places here. Shops dotted around.   Loos everywhere.

There was a steampunk outdoor theatre show just after we arrived. Of all the things I might have been expecting, steampunk in a Spanish themed park, in coastal Honshu, in Japan, was not one of them!

Don Quixote, of course
I rather prefer the penguin 😃

I do like the boom gates for the train

Steampunk:

Spanish village:

 

Unexpected Spanish galleon:

Escalator up to the castle:

Rides:

There is a museum in a castle. It put me in mind, a bit, of Jorvik in York. No little cars taking you round; you have to walk, but on the ground floor there are lots of representations of people doing ordinary things in medieval Spain

Then we went and waited for the shuttle bus back to the hotel. There was an ENORMOUS queue waiting for the bus to the station. So much so that they had to send extra buses to accommodate them all!

Back at the hotel, we had pre-dinner drinks and snacks. Kaori went to the onsen. We had all you can eat for dinner and Lindsey and I had the all you can drink package because it cost $50 for the two of us and a nice bottle of wine was $60. I do realise that we weren't drinking nice wine using the package, but we were happy to settle for slightly less nice wine for a $10 saving

There is a small observatory at the hotel. I have never stayed at a hotel with an observatory before.  It turns out Lindsey has. Around ten years ago she and Ian brought Stella and Tony here. Tony was VERY excited to have an observatory in the hotel

You could see a very clear image of Saturn through the telescope