Thursday, 15 November 2012
And so we come to the end of the overseas leg this particular time around.
With the sightseeing over, and the shopping exclusively in Madam's court, there wasn't great deal for Hughesy to do apart from transform himself into a beast of burden once the morning's Viking breakfast had been devoured.
There wasn't a great deal of hurry in that department since the smorgasbord stays open until, eleven, so it was after a quarter to nine when we made our way downstairs.
We'd stayed at the Oriental on the first night of the first trip, and I remember the Viking that time around with considerable affection. This time around the spread seemed smaller, though still quite adequate and I am, after all, trying to cut down on the dietary intake. The verdict of the bathroom scales once we get home isn't something I'm looking forward to.
The Viking, however, offers traps for young, and even not so young, players.
I started lining up for a freshly made omelette and found that what I had supposed to be fairly finely chopped mushrooms was, in fact, finely chopped octopus. Not bad, but not quite the taste I had in mind.
From there it was back upstairs to pack, and the only remaining items on the agenda came in the form of a spell in the shops at Sannomiya, a train transfer to the dormitory suburb where The Mother lives, another run through the shops after arriving there and the ritual restoring of the various goods and chattels after we'd been reunited with the Black Monster and Madam's Blue Portmanteau.
The only excitement along the way, at least from where I was sitting, came when I was redirected from my position inside the shopping centre, poised and waiting for one of the people occupying the public seating to move and create space for a large hairy foreigner minding two backpacks, the Little Red Travelling Bag and Madam's camera bag.
There was, I was informed, much more seating available outside.
And there was, though there was also the threat of drizzle, a rather nippy wind. Still, I managed to get a bit more travelogue tapping out of the way, a process that continued once the luggage had been sorted.
The result, at 3:29, with nothing to do but lock the Black Monster while we wait for the Socialist Taxi to whiz us over to Kansai International, is that the Japanese territorial trip is almost, as I tap this out, to all intents and purposes, over.
Unsurprisingly, apart from a rather spectacular sunset, the trip to the airport proved unexciting, apart from the interest provoked when a driver attempts to direct a minibus into back streets where it's obviously going to be a tight squeeze. The check in process ran as smoothly as you'd want it to, passing through Immigration on the way out was a no paperwork breeze and half an hour before boarding the head count in the relevant Departure Lounge ran to less than two dozen.