Last day! 26th of December

This morning we got up and packed up. We left our things at the hotel and went for a nice big walk around Ueno park. It was extremely cold, a maximum of 5 degrees. The park has a huge shallow lake with thousands of lotus plants in it. They were all dead because it’s winter, but it was an amazing sight to see. Now I know what lotus roots look like before they’re cut up and cooked. They do not look appetizing floating in duck muck.

We went to the Tokyo National Museum, which is in the park. It’s in a lovely big western-style building. We looked at the old Buddhist statues and some other old Japanese artifacts. They were fascinating and beautiful. My favourite statue was a big wooden carved god/man with a halo of fire. I’ve seen these ones around Buddhist temples and they’re really scary looking. After exploring the museum we went to the gift shop. It initially looked great, lots of books and interesting Japanese things. However, when we looked at anything closely it turned out to be really bad quality and really overpriced. I bought some postcards with pictures of the exhibits on them.

We ventured back out into the cold and walked to the nearest station and trained back to our hotel. I was nervous and had a stomach ache but I managed. We collected our baggage and took the train three stops to Tokyo station, then took the Narita express to… NARITA AIRPORT!

At the airport a nice lady took us and helped us with checking in. Then we went and looked around the shops. We had a light meal at a Western-style sandwich shop and then spent all our Japanese money but 56 yen. You really can’t buy much for 56 yen.

Boarded our plane at 7:35pm Japan time. It’s now almost 1am Japan time and we’ve hit a bit of turbulence. Sucks a bit. Our new noise-cancelling headphones are awesome. Atsu atsu. It’s hot hot. I suppose we’d better get used to the hot if we’re going to Sydney!

Apparently Qantas has put us on a Bombadier Dash 8 tomorrow. This sucks because they’re small planes and have small luggage allowances (4kg of carry-on luggage). We have more than 4kgs of carry-on luggage each so I don’t know what they’ll do. Probably ask us to pay moneys.

I think we should argue that we are both below average weight people, and so that should count as minus 15kgs each. We’d be right that way!

Turbulence sucks! But we’re doing okay.