Our Japan Trip

Japan. The least photographed leg of our journey… sorry! (But how good is the view from our bedroom window at a friend’s house – pictured above!)
Most of you probably don’t know that Tim lived in Osaka for 3 months back when he was 18. He worked for Daihatsu while he was there and made a whole bunch of friends that he still keeps in touch with. So, the majority of our 8 days in Japan was spent catching up with friends and visiting car business that Tim has connections to. 

Our first day we learned the lesson of why you set an alarm when you’re combating jetlag. We got to bed at 9.30pm after our long journey from Milan to Singapore to Osaka, and said “let’s not set an alarm, cause we can just sleep until we wake”, expecting that we’d wake mid morning. 3am and we were both totally awake for a good hour or so… we decided to just ‘doze’ until the sun came up. Next thing I knew I was opening my eyes to a clock that said 3pm! Oops! We had to rush out of bed and go straight to dinner with friends haha! It definitely didn’t make adjusting to the new timezone easy, but man we felt good after 18 hours of sleep. 

Neither Tim nor I are shoppers. However, Japanese department stores are insane to look through! We literally spent an entire day walking through a department store that was 13 stories high, with the most varied and beautifully presented goods! The food section was my personal favourite – filled with sushi and sashimi and detailed cakes and sweets! It’s safe to say we ate a LOT in Japan. 

One thing that really surprised me about Japan, is that people in the back seats of cars don’t wear seatbelts. Every time we were in a car with someone not wearing a seatbelt I’d spend the entire trip absolutely terrified that they’d end up with a severe brain injury if we had an accident. I think my day-job as a neuro physio makes me more aware of the risks of not wearing seatbelts, but I wasn’t able to communicate it sufficiently for my worry to be translated across the language barrier! Seriously, I don’t understand how a developed country doesn’t have better awareness of the importance of having their seatbelts on (especially for kids!).

The family above were Tim’s ‘Japanese Family’ while he was living in Osaka. They were such generous hosts to us and made sure we were so well taken care of! They treated us to a walk to a waterfall (above), a trip to Nara (below), and some very impressive traditional meals. 

We really enjoyed seeing old friends and new for the perfect end for our trip! I still have a list in my phone of hilarious things that were said when lost in translation, which Tim and I still have a chuckle over every now and then. One of which was the description of the Japanese way of eating ramen as ‘noodle harrassment’, and another ‘four-wheel-drive animals’ instead of four legged animals… hahah! So many laughs happened during this trip as we realised our communication wasn’t quite lining up. Thank goodness our friends had good senses of humour and didn’t mind us crying with laughter! 

Just like that, we were headed home! It was an incredible once in a lifetime trip. I’m really happy to leave it as a once in a lifetime occurrence though haha. No more vomiting for the duration of long haul flights for me in a realllllly long time.