Summer is officially here, with plenty of hot, humid days and nights full of air conditioning and occasional sweat storms. Summer is the biggest challenge for me living in Japan, and our usual strategy for dealing with it is to simply leave for a little while.
My company has two holidays in the summer months. The first is next week, the so-called “power saving holiday”. This is a holiday given to the employees of various factories around the Kansai area. The factories voluntarily shut down on a rotational basis to help reduce power consumption during the hot summers. Our factory shuts down from Monday to Wednesday, and it is an easy choice to take two more holidays on my own and get nine consecutive days off.
As luck would have it, my power saving holiday is very close to my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, so we’ll be headed to San Diego to help them celebrate the big event. It should be a low key celebration, with just some time with family and no big day trips or huge parties. The media have not been notified.
It’ll be nice to be back in San Diego, and Kuniko and I have made a short list of things we’d like to do beyond spending time with the family. We are hoping to go to Las Quatros Milpas for some authentic Mexican food, and if possible a trip to Hodad’s would hit the spot. That’s about it – most of the time will be spent chilling with the family.
Once we get back from the trip we have just two weeks before we are off on another one, so we’ve been doing some planning and preparation for the next trip, too. Hopefully it’ll be cooler in the Caucuses than it has been in East Asia so far this year.
Anyway, next stop is San Diego for some family time. I’ll post pics and and a recap when we get back!
