Grindstone cowboy

I was expecting some kind of explosion when I got back to work, or at least opening the office door to find myself washed away by a comical tide of paper. Things were suspiciously quiet though - Monday passed without so much as a rumble and then I went on a brief business trip to Tokyo and came back similarly unaccosted. I can hear the beast lurking in the shadows though, paper skin all a-crinkle. He watches me through hole-punched eyes and gnashes his paperclip teeth, waiting for the moment I drop my guard and say wow, not long till holidays.

And indeed, it isn't long till holidays at all (raaaah). Two more weeks and I'll be off to exhaust the last of my summer leave - another 16 days of nothing to go with the Taipei break I had before. It's not exactly nothing, of course - we have a Tokyo holiday planned and booked for the end of August and are flirting shamelessly with the idea of attempting Mt. Fuji while we're up there. It'll make August a very Tokyoey month, having just got back there from a business trip (don't I sound important). "It's one of the best business trips you can do," my supervisor said after a furtive glance over her shoulder. "Very easy." I'm inclined to agree with her now.

The shinkansen ticket was sitting on my desk when I came in on Monday and after the aforementioned quiet work day, I stuffed a shirt and undies into my laptop bag and we were off. We got to Shinjuku at about lunchtime on the Tuesday and we headed straight to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government building, where a huge line of tourists had formed to get up to the observation deck. We weren't there for sightseeing, though - we bypassed the queue for the window and sat down in an Italian restaurant where we ate the best (and admittedly only) lasagne I've eaten in the past 2 years with crusty bread and the endless Tokyo cityscape stretching out the window in front of us. After that we walked to the hotel the new JETs stay at and spent an hour meeting them, which was as close to "work" as the two days got. We checked in at our little business hotel and had a break from our grueling schedule before heading out again for dinner at a cheery little sashimi restaurant on the main drag. I found Burger King, Yodobashi Camera and several big UFO catcher places, so the rest of the night kind of wrote itself.

The next morning we had a buffet breakfast on the top floor of the hotel, then headed over to pick up the new JETs and start the long trek to Hyogo. We took the shinkansen to Osaka then a bus to the centre of the prefecture where everyone was picked up and ferried off to their new lives. I was embarrassingly tired by this stage - whether it was because of the beating heat, 3 hours of trains or just all my hard work is hard to say. The worst bit of it all was getting home Wednesday night and remembering I had 2 days of work to go back to before the weekend.

Friday night we met Sifton and her friend out for a beer on the terrace and an unannounced dinner at Ajiajia, then waddled home full of dim sum and pleasure to start the weekend aproper. Saturday night we were supposed to meet out in Harbourland to watch the Kobe Summer Fireworks, but the tone of the weekend had well and truly been set by this stage (sitting in our undies in the air conditioning) so we opted to stay in instead. We heaved our dining chairs out on to the balcony, opened a bottle of wine and watched them explode over the city (the fireworks, not the dining chairs). "We've got such a nice spot here," I said, but I hardly needed to point that out.

Million dollar view

In two weeks we'll be on break again, then two weeks after that it'll be September. I have to remind myself of this sometimes, in case we get to December leaving things unsaid, tasks undone or food uneaten. All things considered, I think we've done pretty well so far.