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Two kilos lighter and many experiences richer, I am now typing this from my sofa, overlooking a garden that looks like it has been touched with Japanese nature's lusciousness... The grass is super high and weeds are everywhere. I guess part of my day today will be spent on making it look Dutch again; neatly trimmed.

But you want to hear about my experiences in Japan, not in Holland, so I'll get to that now. I promise this e-mail will be shorter than the last one. Mum told me my aunt Susan prints these e-mails out to read them and the last one was 6 pages. XD Sorry about that, aunt Susan! You all know I talk a lot... :P

I finished my last e-mail on Tuesday, saying how we got to Tokyo and I was waiting for my laundry. Well, when the laundry was finally dry and all, it was already 5 and since Tomoki was coming over around 7, we couldn't really go out to see anything that we hadn't seen anymore, so we decided to just hang out and relax at the hotel.

At 7:15 Tomoki arrived and we took him out for shabu shabu (hotpot). It was really nice and we sat there eating and talking for hours; learning more Japanese as well. I do hope we didn't keep Tomoki out too late; he had to travel back to Chiba still and he was tired from working so much. I'm glad I don't have a job in Japan; working until 8 is completely normal for them and commuting usually takes an hour or more each way. >< On Wednesday we were out the door at 10 and on our way to (I know some of you are very jealous now, but I know you will all get to go there as well some day) the Ghibli Museum! ^^ For those of you who are not jealous right now, but going: the what? I'll briefly explain what it is. Studio Ghibli is a famous animation studio in Japan, which makes anime (cartoon films). It's not just famous in Japan, but all over the world. Ghibli has a very special style of drawing, which you can immediately recognise. And they have a museum just outside Tokyo, which focuses on the way the main writer, Hayao Miyazaki, works. You see replicas of his offices and lots and lots of sketches, storyboards and pictures he uses as inspiration (of old people, landscapes, facial expressions, etc.) There's also a lot of information on how film works; old film projectors, how backgrounds are used, etc. The layout of the museum is one you are supposed to get lost in. Everywhere there are little corridors, staircases, bridges, you go outside and back in again, it's great! There's lots of colour on the walls and all the lamps are made of stained glass. There is also a big stained glass window in the roof. And your entry ticket is a short piece of film! In the basement there is a small movie theatre where they show short Ghibli movies (15 minutes long) that aren't shown anywhere else. The one we saw was about an old couple who work in the fields all day, then eat, sleep, work, eat, sleep, etc. One night, the old man goes out to pee and he notices a group of little mice, the ones that live in his house, dressed in sumo attire, walking into the forest. He decides to follow them and comes across a mice sumo wrestling competition. The mice from his house have to fight these huge white mice, who beat them of course. The next day, the man and his wife spend all day cooking loads of food and sewing new sumo clothes. The mice are very surprised but also very happy. They eat the food and get all nice and fat. That night they go out to the forest again, the old man and woman following them to watch the match. After a very exciting match, the mice manage to beat the huge white mice! And they all laugh all the way home. It was a really cute movie!! The museum was quite small, though, and after two hours we had seen everything (and I bought little Catbus and Totoro stuffed animals and a Totoro handkerchief to go with my bento!). Then we went back to Tokyo. We had to change trains at Shinjuku station, so I decided to go around looking for that huge crossing with the big TV that is so famous. But I couldn't find it right outside the station and I had no idea where to look for it, so we got the Yamanote line to Ikebukuro. Then from the train I did see the crossing, so next time I go to Tokyo I'll have some idea of where to go! In the evening we went to Sunshine City again. We were walking through the shopping centre when suddenly we came across something called 'Namjatown'. There were lots of statues of cats there and it cost 300 yen to go in. Curious, Eddie and I decided to pay and go inside. It turned out to be some sort of theme park inside the shopping centre. There were these cat statues everywhere, and also statues of eagles. There were rides you could go on (but you needed to pay more for that) and restaurants and merchandise shops. One area looked just like an old city street; lots of restaurants, red lanterns, little shrines (with instead of holy items had cats in them), torii gates, etc. It was surreal. XD It's so weird to walk around a place like that and have absolutely no idea what it is for or why or... I will google it after I finish typing this e-mail. On the second floor there was a place called Ice Cream City. It sold... ice cream, duh. ;) It looked like an ice cream city as well, though. Everything looked like it was frozen, you could sit in places that looked like giant sorbets, there were giant displays of all the ice cream that was sold, it was great. So what do Eddie and I end up buying? Something that I think was soy ice cream, looking back on it. It really didn't taste nice and it was really tough, instead of nice and creamy. Out of all the ice cream we could have bought, we ended up picking that. XD That's what you get when you don't understand what's on the packages of anything. >< After leaving Namjatown and Sunshine City, we saw a manga store! I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. There was merchandise everywhere, cosplay clothes, action figures, books... And I found Amber a present, finally! When we got out of there it started raining a bit, though, so we decided to go back to the hotel. I tried to take in all the sights and sounds, since it was our last night in Japan and that started to dawn to me. We went to the same udon place I had been to on one of the first nights of my trip (we were staying at the same hotel) and the guy working there remembered me. He gave us both free boiled eggs with our noodles. And when he heard we were going home tomorrow, he rushed behind the counter and gave me 2 packs of cigarettes. XD I told him I don't smoke, but he was like: "No, is present! You are friend, friend get present!" So I decided to take them. I have some colleagues who smoke so I can give them to them. XD Such a nice guy! On Thursday we got the 9:30 Narita Express to Narita Airport. We had reserved seats so we were traveling in comfort once again. On the train there were monitors displaying flight information and we found out the flight was delayed for an hour. ><

Well, we checked in and dropped off our luggage and then we started the wait. We walked around the souvenir shops for a bit and I bought a really funny book in the book store. It's about funny language mistakes and word mixups foreigners make when trying to speak Japanese. I was really cracking up in the airport, laughing so hard. So that made the wait more pleasant!

We finally left almost 1.5 hour after we were supposed to leave. The flight was booooring. On the way in we each had our own little screens and we could choose which movies to watch and stuff. But we didn't have that this time. There were only screens above the aisle and the one closest to me made me crane my neck really much to see, the one behind that was too far away for me to see well. So I welcomed every food and drink break; a distraction from the boringness. It wasn't very cloudy, though, so I had some nice views of Siberia and Scandinavia. However, we did have a lot of turbulence.

We landed in Amsterdam about 35 minutes later than planned, so that was all right. Eddie and I spent the night at a hotel by the airport, Citizen M, because it was too late for him to travel back to England (Easyjet has flights to Bristol only once a day, leaving about half an hour before we landed). At 3:30 am we were both wide awake. XD So we decided to watch another movie.

Eventually, at around 10am, my dad came to pick me up and drive me to Doesburg. There, I unpacked, burnt all my pictures onto a DVD and drove to mum and dad's to pick up the cats. Cailleach was happier to see me than Billy. XD I managed to stay up until about 12, then got woken up by Cailleach constantly meowing outside the bedroom door at 7:30. I wanted to sleep some more but she really wouldn't let me. She had missed me so much she didn't want me out of her sight anymore, apparently. It's cute and aww and all, but I can't go on holiday anymore unless I have someone staying in my house. Because those two 'cuties' are way too unhappy anywhere else. *sigh*.

So I guess I'll go fix up the jungle, I mean garden, now. Thanks to you all for reading all my stuff and I promise I'll pick out the nicest photos and won't make you watch all 1800. XD