LOST IN TRANSLATION
Very conscious that we didn't spend long enough in Sydney to experience it properly. On Tuesday morning Easter was over, the sun came out and the City felt like a different place entirely. In the meantime, we managed a road trip to the Blue Mountains (which aren't blue, incidentally), and lunch at a gorgeous secret Italian place - Sopra (shhhhhhh), with Tessa's wonderful friends Nick and Jules. Tessa is much better connected in Australia than the internet is, and that's a fact.
Horrible day of travel to Tokyo via practically every other city we hadn't visited in Australia, and seemingly the world. The plane kept errrr ....landing, rather than actually flying. So we went via Brisbane, Cairns, Ramsay Street, Coronation Street etc etc. On top of which we'd been given the exit seats on the plane (as like a 'favour' for our extensive travel status and because the TH is tall,) and found out on boarding that said exit seats were in fact worse than normal seats on account of the great-wall-of-china-bulkhead situated about 4 inches in front of them. So on-off on-off on-off the same plane all day long to the same rubbish seats, learning three times the same way to open the same exit door, till it got to the point that when a new crew got onboard at Cairns I was so grumpy that I greeted them with an unamused 'welcome onboard'. Of course that really helped endear me to them for the longest leg of the journey. Not.
12 miserable hours later - Tokyo. Wow. I have never been to a country before where I don't understand a single word of the language, and what's more, nobody seems to understand any English either. I have never been to an airport before where there is no sign of a cashpoint machine or a taxi, just hundreds of buses with Kanji symbols on them.
We got to the hotel. (Somehow.) And in front of us a group of Japanese businessmen are checking in, greeting each other with an extraordinary and extensive head- nodding ritual. This goes on for so long I feel I must be in an episode of Fawlty Towers.
And then I see the hotel pool. Oh my God! A 4-lane 25 metre empty swimming pool. We can't possibly stay in Tokyo for just one night then leave........how silly would that be?!
Horrible day of travel to Tokyo via practically every other city we hadn't visited in Australia, and seemingly the world. The plane kept errrr ....landing, rather than actually flying. So we went via Brisbane, Cairns, Ramsay Street, Coronation Street etc etc. On top of which we'd been given the exit seats on the plane (as like a 'favour' for our extensive travel status and because the TH is tall,) and found out on boarding that said exit seats were in fact worse than normal seats on account of the great-wall-of-china-bulkhead situated about 4 inches in front of them. So on-off on-off on-off the same plane all day long to the same rubbish seats, learning three times the same way to open the same exit door, till it got to the point that when a new crew got onboard at Cairns I was so grumpy that I greeted them with an unamused 'welcome onboard'. Of course that really helped endear me to them for the longest leg of the journey. Not.
12 miserable hours later - Tokyo. Wow. I have never been to a country before where I don't understand a single word of the language, and what's more, nobody seems to understand any English either. I have never been to an airport before where there is no sign of a cashpoint machine or a taxi, just hundreds of buses with Kanji symbols on them.
We got to the hotel. (Somehow.) And in front of us a group of Japanese businessmen are checking in, greeting each other with an extraordinary and extensive head- nodding ritual. This goes on for so long I feel I must be in an episode of Fawlty Towers.
And then I see the hotel pool. Oh my God! A 4-lane 25 metre empty swimming pool. We can't possibly stay in Tokyo for just one night then leave........how silly would that be?!
posted by jazzshark at 10:49 PM
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