Big Japan countdown

A week from now, I’ll be in Heathrow’s Terminal 5, attempting to simultaneously wake up and take advantage of the hospitality of the British Airways Galleries lounge. And coffee. Mostly coffee. At the start of this year’s trip to Japan!

London to Tokyo, then straight on a flight to Kyoto. Four days there, including a trip to Hiroshima and then back up to Tokyo for a further six days. Despite this being our third visit, I’m as excited as I was before the first. Trips to Japan have been my best ever, most enjoyable holidays.

//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.jsAnd, despite having booked this all so long ago, I’m still slightly unprepared. My mind will be eased by the creation of a packing list (thank you, Evernote) and some sort of an agenda for the trip. We’ve learnt our lessons from previous visits and won’t attempt to pack too much in this time. I have a short list of things to see and do, but aside from that, it’ll be walking, exploring and eating.

I’m particularly looking forward to some trips on Shinkansen ‘bullet’ trains, as we got a week-long pass for unlimited train journeys to take us from place to place. And the calm of Kyoto will be welcome after a particularly hectic couple of weeks here, work-wise. And as we’re visiting in October, I hope we can stumble across some of the crazy Japanese enthusiasm for Halloween – we saw a Halloween parade on our last trip to Tokyo and it was superb. The Japanese really don’t seem to do anything by halves… 

As per usual, I’ll be photographing everything that moves and hoping I can prune down my camera roll to something worth sharing online. No matter where you look, there’s something interesting and/or beautiful to take a snap of.  I’ll try to get a few updates on here and I’ve already hired a mobile wifi hotspot for the duration of our stay (unlimited 4G data for 10 days for a steal!) to ensure we can stay in touch. Having wifi calling on the new iPhones means we’re still contactable even with data roaming switched off. 

So brace yourself for incoming photos and comments about Japan for about a week!

Normal service (moaning about how short the trip to Japan was) will resume shortly after.  I also have to admit that one aspect of the trip I’m really looking forward to has nothing to do with Japan – it’s the flights to and from Japan with BA. Our previous Japan journeys have been fantastic and definitely represented an excellent start and finish to the holidays. Being able to sleep on a proper flat bed during the epic journey definitely makes for a less psychotic me upon arrival. 

All that’s left to do is complete about a month’s worth of work in five days, pack for all eventualities and switch off from work completely. Easy. //embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js