"Osaka for the night" "Wanderings - by Kathrin Goldsworthy (currently NZ)

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From the Web 1.0 days I bring you The Forum. To preserve them for posterity as Geocities can no longer be found but also it's fun to re-read some of them.

22nd October, 2001

This is the view from my hotel in Osaka - or so they tell me! I'm on the other side facing the terminal, and it's night time - but pretty init? Tomorrow before I fly out, I'm going for a walk to find this view,

I arrived in Japan after an uneventful flight. Ho hum. The most exciting thing was being ordered to put my nail scissors and tweezers into my check-in luggage - in case I felt the urge to overpower the crew with the threat of a severe eyebrow plucking, I suspect. (Although the girl in front of me spent a large amount of the flight plucking her eyebrows with contraband tweezers. Thus arriving looking better groomed than moi!!)

So here I am in Japan, and feeling very confused for it too. It looks like China, smells like China in summer BUT it's not. For one thing, it's very, very tidy and orderly. I saw a queue of people waiting for the bus - standing patiently, in single file, up two flights of stairs - what, no pushing, no shoving, no taking up the entire footpath and possibly part of the road??

But once I got to my hotel room, I felt more comfortable - how could I forget the joys of Asian TV & toilets which won't flush toilet paper!! Oh neat!

My loo is very cool though - it has the state of the art shower & dryer for your botty!! Sadly my Japanese is not good enough for me to understand the driving instructions, so I'm too scared to try it out. Think I'll crack open the mini bar instead!! (beer is 600 yen, which is all play money to me, so what the hell, eh?)

Flight #2 - half way to London!! In the last hour I have managed to get lost in the terminal (I'm useless in these places, can't follow simple directions me!), fight with airport tax machine (again, the whole following instructions thing), check in 2 hours too early for my flight and discover I have a lot coins which will be pretty useless outside of Japan. So I bought some nick-nacks at the highly inflated prices and amused the duty free staff with my utter confusion over how to use their currency.

So now on the plane, and have discovered the personal TV in my seat. Cool! Games and all, including one of the feature films - "Bridget Jones' Diary", which I have already sat through twice!! But no matter, cos they have something better - a camera on the front of the plane. COOL!! I watched the take-off (my favourite part of flying) and can see Russia now, as we fly over that big barren part in the middle - otherwise known as most of the country.

Only another 9 hours or so to go. Ho hum. Might watch "The Mummy" now (which scared the bee-jeezus out of me incidentally).

And here I am, flying down through a thunder storm approaching London. Of which I've just had my first glimpse - and huge it is (can take the girl out of the small town, but can't take the small town out of the girl, eh?). There's a rainbow ending smack in the middle of the city - very symbolic of me finding my fortune here me-thinks!

So, here goes - "Kat does the UK". Stay tuned boys & girls!!

XXX Kat

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