Half way to Tokyo.

M and the kids got on a plane to Tokyo this morning (just barely!). That was all much harder than it should have been but they should be in the air on the way from Abu Dhabi to Tokyo now.

It's been a remarkably stressful week.

It started last weekend with me noticing that S had chicken pox just days before they were all due to fly. He actually had spots one or two days before that but I thought they were insect bites (R had insect bites aplenty). We thought we might be able to fly anyway given the timing and the official policies of airlines but the doctor said we couldn't (and if he had not still been contagious, S would have been horrible to fly with on Thursday). So now we're into insurance claims. We were lucky that managed to rebook at about the same price. It seems that not so many people want to fly Etihad via Abu Dhabi on 9/11. Any other airline or Etihad on any other day was 800e more! Virgin Atlantic take bikes for free, Etihad charge them as excess baggage (45e/kg * 20kg = 900e!). So I'm left with an enormous cardboard box with half-assembled bikes in it.

Next up was finding out at the start of the week that my original Tokyo transfer plan has been scuppered by company-wide changes in staffing. I can either wait and see with no guarantees or start down a different path. So now I'm starting down a different path. Also wondering whether I should start dusting off my CV.

Finally today, for no very good reason we barely made check-in at the airport. It didn't help that it was terminal 2 which neither of us had ever been in and, as they say, mistakes were made. It ended with my heading to oversized baggage while M took the kids up to the security queue. Oversized baggage was broken in some way and had a queue of about 30 people with golf bags when I got there. I headed to the top of the queue and explained that they had made special phone calls about our luggage at the desk and that my wife and kids were running for the flight. Once the system was working again, the nice man took our stuff. By the time I got upstairs they were gone.

With about 4 hours sleep and a major dose of adrenalin at the airport this morning I have been completely unsettled all day. I'm supposed to be tidying the house but my stomach is still spinning and doing something useful seems impossible. I wonder would I feel better if I had managed to say goodbye properly. Do the "sad goodbye" chemicals cancel out the "run for your life" chemicals? It was weird feeling like this all day. It reminds me of taking exams or sitting outside the principal's office but that's usually quite quick. Having had it for about 12 hours now, I can totally understand how people give themselves up to the police after they've committed a crime.

Japan - smoking

One afternoon I was flicking around TV looking for a cartoon or something to occupy Ríona for a few minutes. I found a cartoon, so we watched that for a few minutes. It wasn't by any means a toddler's cartoon, it was called "Gunlock (SaiYuki)" (there seem to be several seasons and variants of this anime, I have no idea which one I was watching). It's a retelling of Journey to the West (aka "Monkey Magic") with more modern characters, some guns etc. Although it wasn't a toddler's cartoon, it held Ríona's attention for while I got something else done. She seems to like any kind of cartoon at least for a few minutes.

The cartoon had some violence ("Daddy, boy fell over") but what really surprised me was that one of the main characters was smoking. He wasn't even a bad guy. I was just really shocked to see someone smoking in a kids show at 2pm.

It was actually pretty uncomfortable in Japan on several occasions, restaurants still have smoking sections, usually as big or bigger than the non-smoking sections and we sometimes had to settle for a seat in the smoking area.　We even found one that didn't have a non-smoking section at all!

What's really odd though is that it's not like smoking is entirely acceptable in Japan either. In lots of places, smoking on the street is illegal and some streets had designated smoking areas. And in true Japanese style, people obeyed these rules. I saw plenty of smokers at the smoking areas and I can't remember seeing anyone smoking in the "wrong" part of the street.

Still it's better than China. A few years ago I was in Beijing airport and I went into a restaurant. "Smoking or non-smoking?". "Non-smoking", I said. "Sit anywhere you like", said the waitress. I was sleepless and jet-lagged at the time so I didn't notice how stupid this was. For a while I was the only customer but soon some more tables filled up, including a guy smoking right beside me. It was only then that I understood my conversation with the waitress. The question was purely cosmetic - probably just for foreigners - there was no non-smoking area in this restaurant, or certainly none that the waitress was willing to enforce. I wonder if I had lit up a cigarette would I have been told to put it out because my table was non-smoking?