Sunday, 27th November .....

After a couple of days of heavy rain, the sun is shining and the magpies are celebrating with song. I’ve spent a couple of hours this morning moving some piles of grass, most of it left over from Damo’s last visit when he knocked down most of the heavy growth. He couldn’t take it all away in his truck and both Jamie and I were recovering from operations.

No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t wish it away so we’ve been gradually collecting it and putting it on one large pile. Perhaps it will break down into compost over time, with some help, or we might start the process of taking it bit by bit to the green waste section of the tip. That’s a decision for another day; all we want to do now is get it off the ‘lawn’ and out of sight.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that we were planning a trip to Japan. At that time, it was just a pipe-dream, like so many of my plans. Perhaps 1 in 10 comes to fruition. The pleasure is in the planning and delving in to the internet to reveal its secrets. They say there’s a touch of Asperger’s in all of us and I am the last to deny that. I get great pleasure from working out timetables and schedules and investigating the various ways to get from A to B.

We had our eyes on Nagoya as a base because there is so much to do in that Chubu area. However, I discovered that I could get some reasonable accommodation in Osaka through our timeshare club. It was what they call a Bonus Week at a mid-range hotel in the middle of Osaka and just a few minutes from the main railway station.
It’s costing us just $179 for the whole week so we can’t believe our luck. We’ve never stayed in Osaka but it’s just a short train trip from Kyoto which we know pretty well. From Osaka, we can get out in various directions to some of the most beautiful places in Japan. It’s also only an hour to Nagoya if we want to look at some of the areas I had identified before.

And, it’s all booked! We fly in on May 27th, and book in to the hotel on that day. We will have a seven-day rail pass and that gives us the freedom to do what we like, and will join our cruise on June 3rd.
We have an outside cabin on Deck 6 of the Legend of the Seas which will arrive in Beijing on June 12th. Maybe, we will fly on to Manila from there. Who knows?

There’s only one thing we have to worry about: will there be anyone at the hotel who can speak English. It’s not a hotel which is open to the public and caters usually for Japanese members of the timeshare group? However, sign language has worked for us before and lots of smiles and nervous giggles can often carry the message just as effectively.

I’ve spent a couple of hours this morning trawling the internet for as much detail as I can find on getting to the hotel. It’s not listed under its English name but putting the address into Google Maps has pin-pointed its location. I even found a picture of the front entrance.
Apparently, there’s also a night club at the same address, which can only be a good thing. A couple of hundred metres from the hotel is a subway station called Higashi-Umeda. Umeda is the name of this part of Osaka, and higashi means east. From that subway station, we can move through an underground shopping mall to the main Osaka Station, as well as several other stations, including Nishi Umeda (West Umeda). Above the stations are enormous department stores and at ground level are some of the best restaurants in this part of Japan. I even found a video on You-tube of the underground mall. With all this information, how could we get lost? Ha! Wait and see!