what do you see?

To clarify: Golden Week is an unofficial week of holidays, where a couple of public holidays fall close together. However, a lot of workers are unable to get a lot of time off, so it can be a bit of an anti-climax. Many of them take the rare chance to come in for English lessons on weekdays, hence it's a busy period for us. But better to be working than caught up on the train in the middle of a huge group of raucous old ladies clutching department store bags and bento boxes on a trip in from the countryside...

The garden was nice yesterday, although we went to a different one in the end. After spending the afternoon there, we went to one of the few waterside restaurants (in a place a bit like Docklands - get there by monorail) in Tokyo. The outside tables were full, but the inside bar area was really cool. They also have a microbrewery there. Today we went for lunch (Mexican food!) at my Japanese teacher's house, way out in the suburbs of Chiba (access also by monorail!).

PS - in case you wondered, there's no SARS in Japan at the moment. But people still wear masks, only for hayfever prevention/to stop them spreading their cold!

It's getting a little warmer here now, very spring-like. But, we had our first humid day recently, a harbinger of things to come......rainy season will be here all too soon.

The cherry blossom festivities are all well and truly over now, but the Golden Week holidays start around tomorrow (Greenery Day), so there'll be a lot of people about on trains etc., and also a lot of students coming in to study English on their only time off from work!



Well, we're off to a garden in Tokyo to contemplate 77 zen philosophies now, so I'll talk again later!

Well we managed to get through our first week pretty much OK. Once we got past the first couple of nights of waking up ridiculously early and then not being able to sleep despite being very tired, we were OK. First day off today, we spent most of it reaquaiting ourselves with good old Colton Plaza and shopping for clothes with weird stuff on them (Christine's t-shirt: "I want to peace together body parts"; Phil's: "Homeboys is peace and happy"). Better stop to watch Sabrina now (I know it's bad, but it's in English OK?!!)

My eyes started to go out of focus and flickery, and my hands were shaking at times, but apart from that we got through our first day back OK, fortunately we both had fairly good schedules today. But when will our weekend come...?!

Very nice weather here, around 70 degrees F, sunny and a little breezy. Everything is very green, lots of flowers and blossom (between the concrete edifices and busy streets), but we've missed most of the cherry blossom - again!

Back to the sanity of Japan! After a 12 and a half hour flight from Detroit, we arrived in a very wet, cloudy Tokyo at 5.30pm our time. Back here by 7.30. Now we're cleaning ourselves up ready for work, tomorrow...

Well, in the end we had about 3 inches of snow here yesterday, enough to do some good sledding and build a snow bunny/pig. A lot of it has gone now though, it's a drizzly, grey day.

Almost 10.30am local time, 2nd cup of coffee, freezing outside and grey skies. It's April and we're sitting in waiting for snow! A winter storm is forecast to hit sometime this afternoon, and drop several inches by tomorrow morning...I'll let you know what happens.



Yesterday was our first brief trip into Boston for some shopping. It was a typical Boston day - freezing cold but very sunny. Still a great city, but one thing I noticed was how dirty shops seemed. The fitting rooms smelled of urine in Macy's.

We went for a trip to Cape Cod yesterday, and drove most of the way down it to a small state forest near Orleans. On the way we stopped off at some little towns, a beach and a fish and chip shop where I last went about 8 years ago. It was nice to eat fried cod.

Well we've been here for 9 days now, taking it easy a lot. We needed it. We've visited a few places, mostly shopping/eating opportunities, and also some sightseeing (Mystic, Connecticut). Also watching a lot of TV, some shows/commercials seem even weirder to us than Japanese TV...! My favourite thing to be able to do is drive, haven't done that for over a year. It's also interesting to be able to understand all the conversations around us, although now we realise we haven't been missing much!

We had a bit of snow yesterday, only for a few hours though, and not quite enough to get the sled sliding :-(