Thursday 9th August 2007 onwards…
Returning through the beautiful and efficient Narita airport was far less stressful than the UK travesty.
Tim met us at the gate and drove us home.
It's HOT! Oh my god it's hot!! Thankfully we have air-conditioning. Raymi's ears are a state so I booked a vet's visit for him in case it's something worrying. (Turns out he has an allergy to mozzie bites, same as me, and the only cure is a) keep him inside and b) regular steroid injections. So we leave it as they don't seem to bother him too much).
And the cicadas… LOUD! And constant. Now I like the sounds of a real jungle, but this is something entirely different. For a start they aren't tuneful. There are no trilling frogs to provide the melody. And they are LOUD. Did I mention that?
Towards the end of the month they start dying and Mum asked me to collect one for her so she can paint it when she returns at Christmas. (That's paint as in "artist" not "decorate the dead bug" - just thought I'd clear that up as someone I told about this got confused…) I started off by keeping it in an opaque Tupperware tub, but forgot it was in there so made myself jump each time I opened it to see what was inside. So I moved it to a clear one. The 35mm film shows the scale.
Jetlag this way around is harder to get through - I wake absolutely ravenous at 3am and find it hard to function for some time. Rhiannon wakes very early too. But after a few days, she sleeps about 14 hours straight, lucky girl! Unfortunately, this was on the day that we had people come round to replace our ridiculous oven... with a new one that's exactly the same. So I had to wake Rhiannon up before I wanted to.
Tim has two outings arranged for us.
One is to take Rhiannon to DisneySea - a watery version of Disneyland, apparently. I haven't been.
The other is to an O-Bon Festival one evening