Tag: Family
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Wedged next to Kimonos
Day 7 – Thursday, 4 April 2024 A slow start with some shopping and coffee and cake, the last from a patisserie that hands over its signature items in a little card box with a couple of ice packs in it (this on a 20 degree day) to make sure that your glazed apple absurdity…
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Shrine, Sky Building, Shinkansen and Shochu
Day 6 – Wednesday, 3 April 2024 Woke to the first real rain in Japan. While packing carried on around me, I turned on the television in a moment of idle curiosity to find, between the inevitable morning advertorials for products I couldn’t identify, let alone decide I needed, wall to wall tsunami warnings for…
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Osaka-jō and a Snorey Foot Massage
Day 5 – Tuesday, 2 April 2024 Barely any sleep on the overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Osaka. The train in from Kansai Osaka Airport to Osaka Namba at 6.40am slowly filled up with commuters looking even more zoned out than I was. Seb napped a bit as the carriage filled up – “filled”…
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A Religious Experience
Day 4 – Monday, 1 April 2024 After a breakfast of French toast (Anna) and stealing bits of French toast off Anna’s plate (the rest of us), we packed up, left our bags with our hotel (Aloft KL Sentral, a solid recommendation), and went where we could not, on our last swing past, the National…
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Ascension with Monkeys
Day 3 – Sunday, 31 March 2024 The only sensible thing to do, when the heat and humidity mean walking a hundred metres on flat ground leaves you panting and slimy, is instead to walk a hundred metres up a nearly vertical staircase to a large cave, then down some other steps, up some more,…
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Timing is Everything
Day 2 – Saturday, 30 March 2024 Google knows shit about walking around Kuala Lumpur. This is understandable, because it is precisely the sort of problem computers are shit at. There are no footpaths, barely any along the actual roads. People actually walk, when they walk, which is probably not often, down little gaps between…
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Being Boeing
Day 1 – Friday, 29 March 2024 Foreignness started quickly. In the queue ahead of us to get through international screening was a group – presumably a class – of Japanese high school kids, a couple of bunches of boys and perhaps twenty girls. All were in uniform, the rule presumably being enforced to ensure…
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The Kierkegaard Spandrel
I have, for some time, been taken by the fact that when I photograph my children, they frequently manage to look contemplative, and troubled, and tousled, and very, very cool. This might have nothing to do with the fact that they are the children of two of the coolest people on the planet, and are…
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Self-incompatibility
Spring is springing, and with it the quotidian miracle of new life on many fronts, not least in the fifteen centimetres of unpromising dirt that hems one side of our house block. Hard by the corrugated iron fence that daily prevents violence by separating me from my neighbours has sproinged into existence a minor forest…