It's a rainy Monday morning here in Japan, a great time to get caught up on a bit of housekeeping. Sandi is away at work and Dianne and I decided to lounge around in bed a bit to try and shake off the jet lag from Friday. Everything went well with the flight, we caught our connection OK and other than being a very long flight we survived it intact. We arrived in Nagoya at around 2:15 local time and Sandi was there to greet us after we went through baggage claim and security where they fingerprint you and take your picture. We had some challanges getting out of Nagoya as Sandi was a little unsure of the route and the tollways here are insane. It doesn't help that the highway signs are all in Japanese either and the maps are just as useless. Nonetheless, we managed to find our way home and arrived at Sandi's cute little Japanese house as it was getting dark. After unloading the bags we relaxed with a cup of tea before finally falling into bed.
Yesterday, Sunday, we were up early and headed off to church for Easter Sunday service. The service was in the house of a pastor and we were the only congregation. It was a lovely service, though, and we were treated to a traditional Japanese lunch provided by the pastor's wife afterwards. It was back to Sandi's after that where we met up with a few of Sandi's friends who were dying to meet us and we all drove to a little town called Takayama for coffee. We had a delightful time getting to know everyone and before we left that town we went to a Japanese equivilent of Canadian Tire where some of the girls bought some tropical fish. It took a couple of hours as we were introduced to the Japanese way of doing things, what the girls call the "process" where in order to do anything, you had to first plan it all out, decide who was going to do what, when and where and then proceed to replan it all over again. After circling through the tool section for the third time I finally saw that they were ready to go and so off we went, with plastic bags full of goldfish and happy smiles on the girl's faces. By the time we got home, had a bite to eat and viewed some video of Sandi's trips we were beginning to fade again, so we called it a night and as the rain pouned on the roof we dropped off to sleep.
So now we are just showering and getting ready and we will decide if we are brave enough to venture outside on our own.

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