We have returned - but first - February and March update!

Hello!

Can you believe that I haven't updated this since the end of February?  Wow.  We are back on home soil, got in on May 8th, and both of us started work the following week.  Haven't had time to draw breath, but I have made a concerted effort to upload a stack of photos spanning February to May, and over the next few months, will update this blog with all of the madness and wonder that was/is Japan.

Here's what happened in February.

It snowed.  A whole lot.  Two big dumps of it, record-breaking snow, inconveniently falling over the weekends and wreaking havoc with public transport.

But oh, so pretty.  Fun to play in, scary when slippery and compacted.

The first big dump of snow fell on the 8th of February, the start of a weekend that we'd booked a hotel for.  Wonderfest was on.  I don't really feel like explaining Wonderfest in detail, but in brief, it's a big expo with craft, design, art and figures, lots and lots of figures.  The snow started to fall in the mid-afternoon, and we had already started our journey over to Makuhari, where our hotel was.  Good thing too, because trains stopped on our line a few hours later because of the snow.

Here's some shots of the snow as it fell on Saturday the 8th:

The next morning, it was absolutely beautiful overlooking the beach and the buildings below.

That afternoon, after going through the exhibitions at Wonder Fest, we played around in the snow for a while.  Couldn't resist when there's snow banks like this:

Back at work on the Tuesday after the long weekend, the snow had been cleaned up off the roads, but there was enough left for people to have some fun with.

The snow couldn't even wait a full week to start falling again, and the second big dump of snow began on Valentines day, a Friday.  We had booked time to be away again, this time not far from Akihabara, Tokyo's technological centre.  I took a half day from work and headed home to pick up our bags to head out to Tokyo.  Here's some photos to and from home that afternoon:

Overnight it rained, which made things dicy.  The snow compacted and iced up, meaning you either stepped onto black ice or into slush.  We weren't wearing shoes for snow, regrettably.

Still, there were a lot of good things to have a look at while dodging slushy puddles and black ice slicks.

Returning home on Saturday evening, it had obviously snowed pretty heavily in our area, so we got some nice stuff to walk through on our way back to the apartment.

The next day, Jason shovelled our path and the stairs up to our apartment, and while he was there, he made a snowman.  I went downstairs and got some grotty stones from the carpark to make a face, and donated a couple of crocheted reject things I'd given up on to the cause.

9 days of sunshine later:

That's the fun part of the snow, here's the less fun part of the snow.  Kofu in Japan was completely isolated by heavy snowfalls and traffic accidents along major motorways, and Japanese authorities took quite a while to get it together to help people out.  One of my colleagues wasn't able to get to work for a week because there was no way out of town.

It's hard to illustrate how massive the effects were, but here's a couple of photos of our local supermarket that was never poorly stocked until the heavy snow hit hardest.

In time, things got cleared up, and life returned to normal around Japan.

The last two months in Japan flew by for a range of reasons.  We packed up all our stuff to be sent home to Australia and also put aside things to be sold/given away/thrown out.

This took a lot of time.  I'm glossing over it because seriously, doing this kind of thing is just awful, even if you're in a country that continually excites the senses.  We have never put as much effort into any move or clean up job as the amount we put into this one.

We shifted from our lovely 3LDK (3 bedroom) apartment in residential Kawasaki, 30 minutes by train from Shinjuku.  We moved our remaining possessions and bags to a 1K (studio) apartment in Nishi-Shinjuku, 20 minutes walk from Shinjuku station, and 30 minutes walk to Yoyogi Park, 30 minutes walk to Shibuya.

Here's the view from our window.  Not bad at all.  Luckily we like each other pretty well, because the apartment took a bit of getting used to, and there was nowhere to hide!  We eased into the groove of it, and made the most of our time living in urban Tokyo.

I feel like I blathered on quite a bit there, and it might be good to break for a while, so that the next blog entry is able to have a fairly central theme.  We did other stuff in February and March too, but I'll save that for an entry not focusing on snow.

Til then, thanks for reading, more photos of the snow are here: CLICK