It’s Golden Week in Japan this week – a series of public holidays grouped together to force the population to take some decent time off. During this period, with so many businesses closed, some parts of Tokyo turn into ghost towns, with minimal traffic and a lack of office workers keeping the pavements warm.
Twinkle and I have decided to check into Hotel du Tame for the week – conveniently situated in our own house (this basically entails us moving our bed into the lounge/guest room – feels like waking up in a totally different place!)
We’re on day 7-ish of our new wake-up-at-6am, bed-by-11pm routine. Really enjoying that. Several mornings we’ve been for walks around our local area, exploring, finding out what’s where, building a mental map of where we live.
It feels like more than just getting up a couple of hours early though – its almost like enjoying a whole mini-day before the day even starts. I prefer working in the mornings – for one thing people don’t fire emails straight back in reply to your mails as they normally do during the day and in the evening!
It’s also great to be able to spend more time with twinkle. Doing things like having breakfast at the bakery/cafe in the real hotel next door together, taking photos for an upcoming project, baking homemade banana bread and having that for breakfast (as shown in photo, along with a few others taken in the area this last week)… It all helps prepare for a good day.
As does a spot of gardening. A few dats back I bought our first cherry tree (about 1m tall)! Look forward to seeing that flourish. The avocado is doing well too, with two new leaves since we moved in.
Bit of a concern this morning is the state of two of our three clematis – they’ve suddenly started wilting and developing black spots – this follows my repositioning them in a more windy spot, although I don’t see how that can be connected. One other thought I had is I may have given them tomato feed by mistake. Well, anyhow, I’ve watered them copiously this morning and just hope they recover.
The next project for the house is the building of a table to slot over the fence on the balcony, and the creation of a mounting system for a somewhat interesting lighting system we picked up at IKEA.
Whilst we’re not going anywhere special for golden week, it’ll be good to catch up on work, and spend some time on volunteer projects such as the #quakebook website.
All in all, things are good.
Joseph