Ho hum. Um. Er. Well dear readers on a recent trip back to the UK it was pointed out to us that a blog is really only a blog if there are posts to read and that, cough, it had been a while since our last. Indeed, on further investigation it has been quite some time so let me introduce you to the catch up mechanic called the 'apology post'. Let's skip the grovelling, the humble pie eating and rush ourselves through quite a few months of activities.
The summer was a hot as promised and can best be described as living inside a hair dryer while camping around a warm fire for a couple of months. Of course the air conditioning makes the indoors relatively sane but long walks in the sunshine can be a bit of a stretch. Eleanor casually mentioned that a lot of ex-pats send the non-working partner away for the hottest month and I can't help but feel she is laying the ground work for next year....
During this time Alex was stubbornly refusing to learn to crawl but showed much interest in getting on his feet proper, with a little aid of course. By the time autumn arrived and we were on a plane to Japan for a weeks break he was happily staggered around with a little support...
We spent a few days in Tokyo which exposed us to the crazy but somehow organized world of Japan. It felt like all the exotic charms of Asia in a country where everything runs to time, is easy to figure out and everyone just wants to help rather than sell you something! In our time there we wondered around as much of the city as we could manage but two highlights for me were firstly the view from the Sky tree
This is an impossibly (ok, almost impossibly for all you pendents out there) tall tower from which you can view the city which looks more like a screen shot from Sim city at this angle.
Of course for the geek in me the second clear highlight had to be seeing the Honda Asimo robot. This is a cool little robotic chap which has to be tightly programmed to perform and has an amazing sense of balance and range of actions.If you have no idea what I'm talking about then google 'Asimo' and you will get the idea :-).
We had planned a morning looking around the seafood market and then trying some sushi at a nearby restaurant where we assume that the fish would be fresh. We managed the first part of our plan. The fish markets are very much a working market and we got the impression that tourists were tolerated but not really encouraged. Certainly it was no place for Alex to practice his wondering around with lots of trucks flying back and fro with produce either just purchased or about to be laid out to be sold. There was a huge array of fish, most of which I didn't even recognize and everything was pleasingly haphazardly laid out to add to the sense of chaos.
After all the up close inspection of fish and the overwhelming smell that came with it we decided to veer for a more meat based lunch in the end - not quite living the Japanese life but certainly helping us keep our lunch from bouncing!
For Alex Tokyo roughly marked the start of the regular book at bedtime as administered by Daddy and occasionally he even has the good grace to look at least a little bit interested.
From Tokyo we headed out to Hakone, just outside the city but in the hills next to Mount Fuji. Our hotel was up the side of a very steep hill and we were thankful for the hotel pick up service to get us and our bags up the potential well. In the evening we were a little confused wondering into town - food seemed very hard to come by. Most restaurants were shut and a small place we found open had a flustered owner telling us food would be over an hour away. We still had optimism at this point and the other diners assured us that an hour was an under estimate as they were still waiting so we headed out again. Turns out that the national holiday in China co-incides with the same in Japan and tonight was not the night to be working. We bumped into another tourist who was desperately searching for food as well and we both eyed up the garage and their selection of snacks but decided to leave that as a last resort. Eventually we headed back to the hotel who phoned around and found a place a couple of kilometers away that was open for the evening. Thankful and trying to placate a hungry Alex we got a lift there and filled our boots.
One attraction of Hakone is to get a cable car over the main ridge and then down to a lake on the far side. With nice weather blessing our trip over we wrestled the pram onto the cable cars and headed up. At the top of the ridge some hot pools were used to boil eggs which looked like fun but clearly not as much fun to Alex as sticking his head through the hole in the board with a beer on...
On the lake we had a nice trip across on a boat which looked like it had been borrowed from captain Hook and as a nice touch the clouds parted on Fuji
With Fuji and Japan behind us let's fast forward a little over the weeks before the Christmas break. During this time we did get out and about local to Beijing for some walks in the surrounding hills and got to try out our baby backpack - this was great for letting Alex see where we were going and equally good at exciting the locals who could see him coming and get their cameras ready. How he will cope without all this attention from every stranger we meet when we move to a more western country time will tell.
Sadly before going on holiday we also had to say goodbye to some other expats who were moving back home in December. This included Thomas and Ceri who we came out to Beijing just a month or so before us - the goodbye parting photo of the girls in, where else, the Blue Frog...
Right, the Christmas trip will have to wait but I will mention that several people wondered where our posts had gone so thanks for reading :-).
The summer was a hot as promised and can best be described as living inside a hair dryer while camping around a warm fire for a couple of months. Of course the air conditioning makes the indoors relatively sane but long walks in the sunshine can be a bit of a stretch. Eleanor casually mentioned that a lot of ex-pats send the non-working partner away for the hottest month and I can't help but feel she is laying the ground work for next year....
During this time Alex was stubbornly refusing to learn to crawl but showed much interest in getting on his feet proper, with a little aid of course. By the time autumn arrived and we were on a plane to Japan for a weeks break he was happily staggered around with a little support...
We spent a few days in Tokyo which exposed us to the crazy but somehow organized world of Japan. It felt like all the exotic charms of Asia in a country where everything runs to time, is easy to figure out and everyone just wants to help rather than sell you something! In our time there we wondered around as much of the city as we could manage but two highlights for me were firstly the view from the Sky tree
We had planned a morning looking around the seafood market and then trying some sushi at a nearby restaurant where we assume that the fish would be fresh. We managed the first part of our plan. The fish markets are very much a working market and we got the impression that tourists were tolerated but not really encouraged. Certainly it was no place for Alex to practice his wondering around with lots of trucks flying back and fro with produce either just purchased or about to be laid out to be sold. There was a huge array of fish, most of which I didn't even recognize and everything was pleasingly haphazardly laid out to add to the sense of chaos.
After all the up close inspection of fish and the overwhelming smell that came with it we decided to veer for a more meat based lunch in the end - not quite living the Japanese life but certainly helping us keep our lunch from bouncing!
For Alex Tokyo roughly marked the start of the regular book at bedtime as administered by Daddy and occasionally he even has the good grace to look at least a little bit interested.
One attraction of Hakone is to get a cable car over the main ridge and then down to a lake on the far side. With nice weather blessing our trip over we wrestled the pram onto the cable cars and headed up. At the top of the ridge some hot pools were used to boil eggs which looked like fun but clearly not as much fun to Alex as sticking his head through the hole in the board with a beer on...
With Fuji and Japan behind us let's fast forward a little over the weeks before the Christmas break. During this time we did get out and about local to Beijing for some walks in the surrounding hills and got to try out our baby backpack - this was great for letting Alex see where we were going and equally good at exciting the locals who could see him coming and get their cameras ready. How he will cope without all this attention from every stranger we meet when we move to a more western country time will tell.
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