Post holiday brain doze

I apologise for the blandness of my last two posts, which were scheduled placeholders while we were in Japan.  I didn't want to leave a three week gap in the blog because I know some of you would worry, and I also don't like announcing "hey, we're away on holiday!" online even though DS was house-sitting.  We had a wonderful trip, my excessive over-planning paid off and everything went really well. To my relief, all the bookings I made in advance for hotels (two of them in Japanese using Google Translate), the car, the sumo tickets, the pocket wife etc. all worked out fine.  We flew in and out of Tokyo so had a few days there, then went to Osaka to watch an afternoon of the sumo tournament before heading to the island of Shikoku for a week and a half which included a five day driving holiday.  We returned to Tokyo via Himeji to see the stunning castle there. The spring weather was similar to the UK, varying between a chilly 6C to a sunny 17C, and we only had a few rainy days.

We got back Friday night after being awake for 22 hours, but as per our last Japan holiday I haven't had too much physical jetlag travelling east to west (Japan is nine hours ahead of the UK).  What I do have is mental fog which I think is partly a feeling of  anticlimax now that the big holiday is behind us, and partly trying to adjust to not seeing amazing things and tackling new situations all day every day.  Instead I've spent the weekend doing several loads of laundry and sorting out the paperwork that piled up while we were away, plus making a start on tackling the spring tasks in the garden and re-stocking on groceries. And tomorrow I get to go back to work - yippee! But it is great to be back home, I especially appreciate all the space after living out of small hotel rooms for so long, and my comfortable bed: Japanese beds seem to be quite hard and the pillows are just thin slabs (one hotel pillow had about two inches of padding on top with the underside of the pillow being stitched channels filled with hard beads - why????). It's also a treat to wear clothes that didn't come out of my suitcase.

But we saw many amazing things, ate lots of wonderful food (sometimes without knowing what it was exactly), tried new experiences, marveled at the history and beauty, shook our heads over all the concrete and overhead wire tangles, and enjoyed much shopping (to be fair, this would be me more than DH). 

My table full of loot after unpacking

I'll blog some of my purchases over the next few posts.  I visited a great dollshouse shop in Tokyo, paid a return visit to Nippori Fabric town and Tokyu Hands, and also stumbled across several other fabric shops, and bought a fair number of souvenirs, gifts and some craft books.  I did find a knitting shop in Himeji but I didn't buy anything because I still haven't figured out the Japanese sweater pattern I bought last time.

While I only remembered a fraction of the Japanese I studied the past year, it really helped us out especially on Shikoku where there is much less English spoken.  It made a real difference to be able to ask simple questions, order things in restaurants, ask for a full tank of petrol and make polite remarks. We were still functionally illiterate as we can't read kanji, which could be frustrating, but I could sound out kana script (Japanese has three written scripts) which led to small victories when I could identify what the next train stop was or make an educated guess as to what the food was in the window of the restaurant. You don't appreciate how much you take reading all the text around you in daily life for granted until suddenly you can't read most of it. I haven't decided yet if I will keep studying Japanese. On the one hand, it seems a shame to give up after I've invested so much time. But on the other hand, it is such a difficult language that I know I will never be anything like fluent and there aren't many opportunities to use it here in the UK.

In the last few days in Japan, we finally started to see some Sakura, or cherry blossom, which was what I had hoped for when I planned a spring trip.  The Japanese go crazy for it, there were huge crowds in the Tokyo park we visited on our last day, with probably a hundred photos being taken every minute of every possible aspect of blossom.  It felt like taking part in a national celebration.  The trees were beautiful even though it was a grey day.

We also stopped to walk around this lovely canalside cherry grove in Uchiko on Shikoku, along with many locals all stopping to take pictures.

It's good to be home.