Hello from Raleighwood. We got home last night about 10pm local time. The flight home was uneventful for the most part except for a few things along the way.
Our last day in Osaka, we got up and went downstairs (money, money, money) and had breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Breakfast was expensive ($18 each) but they had something that made it worth Alsan's time--a fork. Yes, I said a fork. I knew there were forks in Japan but somebody was hiding them to torque me off. I found one of the forks and $18 later had breakfast. This was not your normal Golden Corral buffet, it looked sort of the same but it wasn't even close to it. There was octopus balls, miso soup, noodles, funky looking rolls that had bacon in them , and a few things that I actually recognized like fruit and yogurt. And of course they had my favorite, a fork. So, I got me some octopus balls and rolled them around on my plate and played putt putt golf with them before I dunked them in miso soup to drown the octopus inside. During breakfast, I played solo and eagled two holes on my plate.
After breakfast golf, we went back upstairs (money, money, money), packed and left, We walked outside and caught a taxi with the aide of the engrish speaking hotel lady. She explained to the taxi driver that we wanted to go to the airport and Homebodysan nodded and commenced to trying to put our luggage into his clown car sized taxi. That is when the fun started. Homeboysan (taxi driver) was dressed in a Miss Manners outfit with white gloves like all taxi drivers in Japan. Homeboysan had on a suit and was afraid of getting his pretty little suit dirty which is totally contradictory to US taxi drivers who seem afraid to wash their clothes much less take a bath. Homeboysan put the bags into the trunk, and packed, adjusted, packed, adjusted, packed, AND adjusted until I had about enough and looked around for a different taxi to put our ugly, American, dirty bags into. Then Homeboysan decided to go with the flow and try and close the trunk lid which wouldn't close due to our bags being too large. You would have thought I wanted him to solve differential equations or something by his difficulty with the luggage. Homeboysan pulled out a pretty little strap that he hooked, rehooked, hooked, rehooked, hooked, and rehooked the strap until I wanted to Three Stooges slap the pretty, little, ugly off his face. By now I was hunting in my electronic Japanese translator a phrase for something along the lines of "I'm going to put my huge, American foot up your butt if you don't quit messing around with that stupid strap and get me to the stupid airport" but there wasn't any phrases in the translator that quite expressed the urgency that I felt. As it turned out, Homeboysan must have understood his pending doom and ran around and opened the rear, passenger door with his little, control handle from the driver's seat. I kid you not, Japanese taxis have a lever that they can open the rear door with a lever. Isn't that special? We got into the taxi and Homeboysan pulled away then started saying something in Japanese while waving his hands. This went on for couple minutes, then I used my huge, American brain and figured out that he wanted me to put on the seatbelt. Well La De Da. The fun started up again here. I pulled the belt around me and couldn't get the buckle to catch. I tried and tried, even Deb tried but we could get the belt to latch. Homeboysan was jabbering and waving and having a Japanese dying duck fit in the front seat. Homebodysan decided to stop the clown car on the side of the road to come back and do it for me when the buckle caught. At this point all diplomacy drained from my usual diplomatic person, and I wanted to give Homeboysan five good reasons upside his Miss Manner's head to get me to the airport and quit playing games with us. He jabbered, waved, jabbered, waved, jabbered, and waved until he started driving again. To add to our stress level, Homeboysan jabbered about some nonsense all the way to the airport which took about twenty minutes. When we arrived at the airport all of the stupid, airport signs were in Kangee (Japanese characters) which were impossible for us to read. Homebodysan started jabbering and waving his arms again, and we deduced he wanted to know which airline we were on. We told him JAL (which is Japanese Airlines) about ten times and even wrote it down but Homebodysan didn't give us a clear indication that he understood. Ultimately Homeboysan stopped at an arrival gate (not our airlines BTW) and jabbered and waved at a guy standing there until Homeboysan nodded yes and drove us to the JAL terminal. Miss Manner's then opened the door with his pretty, little handle to let us out. We got out, I sneered at him, and we went inside and flew to Tokyo.
What we didn't know was an earthquake had hit north of Tokyo while we were in the air from Osaka (western part of Japan) to Tokyo (eastern part of Japan). We found out about the earthquake the next day when Deb's mom told us. The Tokyo airport was buzzing as most airports and didn't show any signs of trouble. We checked in at the American Airlines desk and went to lunch in the airport with several hours to wait. The restaurant was like any restaurant in the US except it served Japanese style food. Yes it only had chopsticks much to my dismay. We stood and looked at the plates in the restaurant's window and picked something that looked like food then pointed our choice to the waitress who nodded she understood. I remember thinking that maybe she should drive a taxi. A few minutes later the waitress brought out the Bento boxes. I wouldn't eat anything that I ordered so Deb switched with me. I poked at the stuff and there were several, and I do mean several, things on the tray. I tried something that looked liked pickled turnips. It was pretty but tasted like butt. I tried something that looked like pickles. It too was pretty but tasted like pickled butt. I tried the miso soup. It was good but it had little clams floating around in it with the shells on. Then I tried the other stuff and each item had the commonality of being pretty but tasted like butt. So we finished the Japanese McButt food and decided to head toward the gate and flew home.
Again, we are home and The Puppies are glad we are home too. It has been a long and fun two weeks. I plan to add some photos as soon as I can. See Yall later.
Al
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