Something something festival

Silver Week has arrived, little brother to the (in)famous Golden Week - a pair of long weekends with 3 work days dangling in between them ripe for annual leave. Given that we're going to be spending most of next week at K-Mart though, I've diligently decided to come in and try to get at least some work done during September.

Hyogo seems to be sandwiched between two typhoons at the moment, which means I had my first real "I wish I had a car" moment walking to work this morning. I would use the word "soaking" rain but it doesn't feel strong enough; it actually just started ignoring my umbrella after a while and I sloshed my way into the office looking like I hadn't bothered with one. Tomorrow is going to be the same, so I can look forward to tipping out my shoes and wringing out my trousers again.

Fortunately the weather held up over the long weekend and we spent Sunday at an outdoor beer tasting thing at the local expat club. It was called the "Sannomiya Beer Festival" or some such because everything in Japan has to be a festival; it wasn't until we got there that we realised it was quite literally a Sunday Session. There was a band wailing away in the background, lots of aging blokes in ray-bans were standing there getting sunburned and the "tastes" seemed to be getting everyone plastered. 7 beer tickets were included with entry, each redeemable for a fairly big plastic cup - if you got through all of them I'm pretty sure you would suddenly find yourself in Cottesloe mooning a police car. We went from Rokko to Minoh and back - porters, honey beer, pale ale, IPA and the self declared "king of wheat beers". They were lovely but after 5 I started to go back in time; we decided to donate our last couple of tickets to the "lads" and move on. They had pies though! I had a $10 meat pie with a scoop of mashed potato before we left and I insist that it was a bargain.

Apart from that we enjoyed the weekend at our leisure - had a wander around Kobe and Osaka and made a point of exercising and eating in whenever possible (except for a new meal around 4pm we've christened "dunch"). I can't say "Guam" at this point without Lisa going "Ribs!", so I think we'd better behave ourselves while we can.