Tag Archives: Vacation

Lately… Busy

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Been quite busy lately, both at work and privately. Last week I was on a business trip to our San Mateo office. Privately I’ve been engaged with Global Leadership Cafe. We are planning another World Cafe. This time about Feminine Leadership. I am helping out with setting up the event as well as setting up our website. Have a look at glcafe.asia and let me know what you think.

Although both Chie and I’ve been busy lately we will have time for a short vacation trip this weekend. Tomorrow we are flying to Hokkaido to return on Monday evening (Monday is a national holiday here in Japan). Looking forward to it 🙂

Pool Side

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Chie also took the day off today. We spent the morning together at the pool side about 250 meters away from the apartment. It was quite cooling to stay in the shadow and then to cool off further in the pool when the shadow got too hot.

A funny thing with Japanese public pools is that every 50 minutes the lifeguards call everyone out of the pool. To make sure everyone rest and get warm, because whether you are a grown up or a kid visiting with your parents you are not capable of making that sure for yourself 😉 Then the lifeguards checked that nobody was on the bottom of the pool (surprisingly people tend to drown about 49+ minutes after entering the pool… NOT). I laughed all the way home.

Weekend at Ocean 6

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Once we got back home from our vacation in Yamaguchi we repacked our bags and went with Sachi-san and her two dogs to Ocean 6. We arrived late in the evening welcomed by a repellant smell from the fridge. Turned out the company that maintains the property had turned off the electricity a couple of weeks or so before and that does not make a good combination with food and heat. We had an hour or two of cleaning out the fridge before we could exhaustedly go to bed.

On Saturday morning we found out that not only the fridge get impacted without electricity. The pool too get impacted. It was green. So we had to pump out all the water and then scrub from top to bottom. A day’s worth of work. Luckily the weather was nice but not hot so we could do without the pool.

On Sunday we had an video chat with Toku-san from Bali and he pointed out that we should probably clean the pool filter too. So that was how we spent Sunday. Cleaning the pool filter. And once that was done it turned out the valve in the pool umping system had to be replaced so we continued doing that until later Sunday evening.

Just past 11 pm we were back in Naka-Meguro and just fell into bed 🙂

Final Day

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Final day of our vacation in Yamaguchi. I put in almost 1.5 km of swimming in the morning as well as some quality time in the hot tub. By 11 am we had checked out and were on our way to kill some time before our return flight to Tokyo.

First stop was a national treasure. A pagoda from 1452. Quite beautiful. Our second stop was a handicraft community building. Chie tried to be a colourful… Egg?


National treasure An egg?

Our final stop was the anti-climax. We went to where Christmas tradition in Japan started. A quite modern white church with colourful somewhat kinky glass. Not so impressive compared to the massive, old cathedrals you find in Europe. And no Santa in sight!!!


Start of Christmas tradition in Japan

After that we went as straight as we could (the car navigator was not the best) to the airport and by 16:30 we were back home.

A Normal Day at Kokian

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There was not much to do at Kokian than spending time in our pool and hot tub. So that is what we were doing. Our room, or rather our own small villa, had a walled garden with enough greenery to keep it quiet and private from the few buildings around.


Garden and Kokian room Swimming

In the afternoon we had a look at the koi in the pond – we even had a chance to feed them 🙂 and then some more pooling and hot tubbing. I managed to do almost 1.9 km in the 7.5 meeter, 33 degrees hot pool.


Koi Relaxing

After dinner we brought drinks and dessert out in the common garden, looked at stars and moon, and relaxed.