Sunday, October 28, 2007

Days #15 and #16 - Homeward bound

Having been beaten by the weather in our quest to see Mount Fuji, we spent our last few hours in Hakone in the toy museum. Lauren whizzed through the museum very quickly, showing little interest until I pointed out the Playstation 2 set up with a port of Galaxians, after which she was, of course, hooked.

We got back to Tokyo without any dramas, and spent the remaining hours of daylight wandering out Shinjuku once more, firstly in search of a kimono for Emily (she rather baulked at the ¥750000 price tags though), secondly in search of an iPod Touch for me (they were all sold out, and I hadn't thought to jot down the address of the local Apple Store), and thirdly somewhere to have coffee (preferably one which offered soy milk). For once, there wasn't a Starbucks on every corner, so after walking around in circles for an hour or so, we settled for Cafe Espresso, whose sign outside looks suspiciously like Starbucks', at least from a distance.

After dinner with our hosts, it was time to pack for our flights back to Australia the next day. The only excitement at Narita was trying to get through security - Emily had the usual problems with liquids in bottles (gotta watch out for that highly dangerous exploding soy milk), and for once I had a problem with my camera tripod; then we just had enough time to spend our remaining yen, before getting on the plane.

This time our stopover in KL was a mere 90 minutes, barely enough time for to find the Starbucks there and to spend the last of our Malaysian currency. I, of course, had to keep away from the many TV sets which would have given the game away as to who won the Chinese Grand Prix.

Monday morning saw us touching down once more in Sydney - with Monica waiting at the airport to pick us up, I was at work in time for our usual 9:30 meeting. It took a while to get over the urge to bow to everyone in sight - I might have gotten looks...

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