home sweet home?

Near as C and I can figure, hotel door to home door, it was roughly a 32 hour trip. It would have been slightly shorter, except, as a politician would say, “Mistakes were made.” I wish we could have flown into kansai intl. but the tickets were more then double then the cost of flying in/out of Narita.

It feels a bit strange being back in Japan. Though we were not gone for all that long it definitely feels like it was a long time ago. Best part was getting a huge, nice meal after finally getting back to the Kansai area. The worst part about the trip was that this British Air flight didn’t have movies on demand like we did on the flight out,(it had several channels on a 2.5 hour loop) and we had already watched half of them on the way too Europe. I like a lot of movies when I fly to keep from dwelling too long on the fact that I am trapped in a thin aluminum tube with 400 strangers with nothing around us but blue, blue sky and if something did go wrong we would likely asphyxiate long before hitting the ground…..

One thing that I think is new is that they are training drug dogs at the Narita airport. While we were waiting for our luggage (our bags are ALWAYS the last to come out, when they arent taken by another passenger accidentally) they were running dogs around the baggage claim area one at a time looking for a placed suitcase. I am guessing the bag had actual drugs inside as it had about four customs officers staring at it constantly. The first handler that ran the exercise was a TINY Japanese woman, she could not have been five feet tall, and probably weighed less then the golden retriever she was leading. The vest she was wearing went almost to her knees. After the dog found the target bag (which had been placed next to me of course) and got its reward play, it was still so excited it was bunny-hopping in place. After a few hops the handler joined in and the two of them bunny hopped together all the way out of the baggage claim.

I just had to laugh out loud while standing next to the carousel at the thought of all the would be smugglers getting twenty years in prison from this bunny-hopping duo.

We came back home to find my sister is trapped in San Diego. She is a student there and reports that the dorm residents (one of whom, she is not) were virtually trapped in their rooms for three days. I predict that in 9 months time there will be a spike of drop outs in SD area schools due to pregnancies. (I mean they are university students, I doubt their supplies of pot lasted more then 12 hours, and after that what are they gonna do? study?)

I also advised her that if cannibalism sets in, vegans would probably be better tasting then habitual meat eaters. However, bumping off meat eaters first would probably also eliminate the competition, so she would have to solve that conundrum on her own.

I will be putting up more pictures as soon as I can. In addition to getting ready to relocate to the states (assuming there is anything left after this fire) C and I are planning another trip to Europe in December.