Today is the first day back to work in nine days. We had the annual Golden Week holidays which are a happy coincidence of several national holidays lined up together. Every year Golden Week holidays mean that many people in Japan take the chance to travel, and unfortunately that means spikes in hotel and flight prices – sometimes double or triple the regular rates. So as usual, we decided to stick around and take things easy, and instead do our traveling in July, August and December. So how did we spend all that time off?
We hosted a college friend of Kuniko’s, who brought her two kids and husband along for a Mexican lunch. We cleaned out our closets – especially focusing on old paperwork that we had collected over the years. It felt good to throw so much paper out!
We did a Costco run, and also visited the new opening of “Jupiter” – the replacement import food store that opened recently. This place looks pretty good, actually, and I think we could have had a lot worse. We buy a lot of food items from overseas, and it is nice to have a source nearby.
We also spent some time at the beach and Akashi Brewery. The brewery was celebrating their 20th anniversary with half price beer, and they also introduced three new kinds of beer. That combination was hard to pass up during the warmer weather of May, so together we visited twice (on the first day and the last day of Golden Week) and I snuck in a solo visit as well.
I met up with Yoshi and together we went to see the Hanshin Tigers playing at Koshien stadium. It had been about ten years since I had cheered on the Tigers at the stadium, and we really enjoyed the game. It turned out that the Tigers lost in extra innings, but it was an exciting game to watch up until the end.
For Cinco de Mayo we had carne asada on the grill, and chips and guacamole, so we even covered the foreign holiday events.
The most important thing about the holidays was having the time to spend it slowly with Kuniko. We sometimes get caught up in our work schedules and routines and Golden Week gave us time to concentrate on each other and to remember how lucky we are to live the way that we do. We are being careful not to take any of this for granted.
So the holidays are over and it is back to work for us. We’ll be on a regular work schedule until July when we’ll be able to sneak off to the USA for some family time. Until then, back to teaching!
