oh, oh, oh

I keep getting more and more excited!

Havana!!!!

Our pre-posting medicals are done, and none of us are dying of a dread disease (although I had a weekend where I was dying of cancer because my urine test was a little odd - turns out I am "normal" - I think that actually reads "neurotic" for me...). Sam made it through his various (2) needles without screaming once (most likely because I was off in another room at the time getting xrayed or peeing - abnormally, that time - in an impossibly small cup).

I'm finishing up my last training at TELL, so work is starting to look finished - whenever a big new issue comes up, I can defer to my replacement, as I am LEAVING! Although there are a couple of things coming up that I will be doing - presenting the Life Line to kids (shudder) at various international schools... I have no problem presenting to adults, but put me in front of 50 kids and I am a wreck. How do I do this? What do children want? Friendly? Youthful? Accessible to youth? How do you exude those things? I have no idea... Good thing most of my friends are all grown up...

And I have to start our inventory, which is a big stinky list of everything we are moving, what it is worth, where it is going, how it will get there... My thought is that this might actually be important this time, as most of our belongings will be going by sea and arriving in Cuba during hurricane season.

And I foolishly read the pre-posting report from the Havana Embassy, which kindly informed me that the only things that I can rely on finding in the grocery stores are "beans, rice, rum, cigars, mayonnaise and olives". And bring everything else you might need in a three year period... Ha ha ha. I figure if I start with enough of the rum, I can make a decent (if repetitive) meal out of the rest of the ingredients. I hope the dog likes mayo on her beans.

But whenever I get stressed about it, I just check the weather in Havana...

Love Hotel Bust

So, since Friday was a holiday for me and Steve, but not for Sam, and since my visiting parents were still in Kyoto, we thought we would round out our Japan experience by checking out a Love Hotel.

We had a light breakfast and wandered off to love hotel hill in Shibuya, all a-giggle and ready for some fun...

It was cute wandering around an area populated almost entirely (and sparsely populated, at that) by couples - many of them holding hands, which isn't all that common here.

Most of the love hotels are pretty nondescript - you enter through a well-shaded and walled entrance into a tiny lobby - most of which had big light-boards with pictures of all of the rooms - if the picture was lit up, the room was available.

We must have wandered into at least 20 love hotels, searching for the perfect theme room. Or, eventually, any theme room at all - and came to several conclusions:

1. Friday morning at 10 am is an incredibly popular time to have sex in Tokyo - most of the rooms in most of the hotels were booked.

2. Contrary to everything I have heard, there are very few "theme" rooms in love hotels - we only saw one (fairly unimpressive - a couple of desultory chains attached to the wall) s&m room, and not a single hello kitty room - although more than a couple did have karaoke included. Oh, and some had hot tubs, but the thought of (as Steve put it) "stewing in other people's juices" somehow didn't invoke the right reactions...

3. People must really not have anywhere else to have sex in Tokyo - these rooms were, on the whole, terrible. Depressing, small, and the lobbies of the hotels all smelled sort of sad and old. If I wanted to have sex in a depressing, characterless room, I would do so at home, surrounded by our foreign affairs furniture and putty-coloured drapes. I certainly wouldn't pay 30-40 dollars to fulfill my "trailer park meets Sears catalogue" fantasies - even if I had them...

So much for kinky, illicit Friday morning sex...

We had coffee and a croissant instead. That's what 19 years together will do for you.

so much work!

You know, I haven't been blogging at all lately, and I completely blame my computer. It died... Well, the motherboard died, and that meant reconfiguring the hard drive - but no-one at the shop told us that, so we lost everything. Luckily, all of our photos were on the alternate hard drive, and will soon be copied to disc for safekeeping. As soon as I find the time to buy some discs...

So, we really did lose everyone's contact email - so please, please send me an email if you are someone I care about - even in the most minor of ways!

Since the computer came back, all shiny and new and EMPTY, we have been working to upload all of our music to iTunes again. Yes, they were on the iPod (are still), but apparently I didn't download them right the first time, so Steve is "happy" to have the opportunity to do it right. If I had the camera (maybe later), I would take a photo of our music collection, so you would get an idea of how much stinking work it is to re-download all of our stinking music...

Wouldn't it be clever, I thought, if I could backup the iTunes so that if this ever happens again, I will already have it all... You can see where this is going, no doubt. The way to back up your iTunes is to put your music on cds... How helpful - but lucky me, my music is all already backed up! It just takes days and days and days to put it back on the computer when the computer inevitably DIES!!!

Anyway, all of that is just stuff. The great news is CUBA! This has been a stinky, cold, wet spring in Tokyo, and I am about ready for 3 years of summer. And the opportunity to be functionally literate again. I mean, my Spanish is nothing to write home about (at least not in Spanish), but at least I can read it! What a relief that will be. I'll be able to ask for things in stores! Oh, wait. There won't be anything in the stores. Well, at least I will be able to order a Cuba Libre. Or a Cervesa. Or some vino. Come to think of it, I can do all of that in Japanese, too.

Cuba Libure, onagaishimasu.