East of Honshu 25th April

 Our last sea day, and our last day on board. Unfortunately, this can mean only one thing… packing. Which should be fairly straightforward, as it’s just putting all our stuff back in the cases it came in. But it always seems quite time consuming. For a start, things have to be folded pretty tidily to fit in. Also on account of accidentally buying some sort of package, we have two fluffy dressing gowns to fit in. Not heavy, but unavoidably bulky.

Before I make all of this sound too difficult I should admit that I was only the assistant here. There needs to be some sort of planning or system, and you can’t have two people in charge, so I’m not. Thus it meant performing a range of menial tasks (folding, threading, carrying) and then sitting down and returning to my book.

In between spurts of packing we read, and went to meals. We also had two half-bottles of champagne and the remains of a bottle of gin to finish. Which was relatively late in the day and so didn’t impede our performance particularly. I’m not completely sure where all that came from, just sort of accumulated.

The other factor was that they want our cases outside our door at some point in the evening, so they can cart them off. We collect them in the terminal after disembarking. Which means calculations about what we need to wear this evening and tomorrow morning, so we don’t pack that and have some things we’ll need to carry about tomorrow.

Anyway, this is where we were at lunchtime today when I went out onto the balcony.

And some final observations as today’s entry is really just padding anyway. The Japanese are very tidy and there’s no rubbish anywhere, but there are also few public bins, so sometimes you need to carry your icecream wrappers for a long time. It is also correct that there is a lot of bowing involved when you encounter Japanese people, though their expectations of foreigners is appropriately low. Which is kind of pleasant, in that being polite and respectful to people is a nice thing to be.