It was just under two years ago that ‘Er Indoors and I had headed off to pick up the latest of her assistant teachers from the airport, a slightly surreal experience as a big city girl from Nagoya got her first taste of rural Australia. Three months later three members of her family had come to visit her in Australia and we’d met her mother and two sisters on Hamilton Island.
Now, outside the store where she worked before coming to Australia (quite upmarket it was too, at least as far as I could tell) we met up with the mother and one of the sisters, who whisked us up to the 14th floor for a panoramic view southwards across Nagoya towards Nagoya Castle.
From there it was on to the Marriott Hotel tea rooms on the 52nd floor where we spent the next two hours chatting. The chatter was, predictably between ‘Er Indoors and the Matriarch, with occasional comments from the daughter and Yours Truly. My attempts at humour produced polite laughter all round, though I was unsure whether the majority of the audience actually got the joke.
We finished with the usual ritual exchange of gifts as I reflected that the reason the suitcase never got any lighter was because everything you brought with you as a gift was invariably replaced by whatever they’ve given you in return.
We headed back to the hotel for a short rest before dinner, with three more of Madam’s old high school and university chums. With the batteries recharged we headed down to the lobby to meet up with them, then headed across to the station complex again in search of a dinner venue.
The first choice, a nice-looking brasserie, was ruled out through an inability to handle a party of five so we ended up in an eating and drinking establishment where we worked our way through another interesting variety of small platters with a wide-ranging conversation before drawing stumps around ten.