The Very Long Day
The Japan holiday comes to an end, and now we have a really, really long day in order to get home.
We were collected from our hotel this morning and delivered to Kansai Airport in Osaka. First we shuffled through one queue for check-in, then through another for security. Fortunately we did not have to wait very long until boarding commenced, under an hour. We taxied and took off, and that is where we are up to now.
It is a four hour flight to Guangzhou (on a plane without any in-flight entertainment), then we are waiting for three hours. Another flight, ten or so hours until we arrive in Sydney, collect bags, then catch a train home. Maybe another two hours, maybe even more.
With some rough maths and a little bit of guesswork, I am reckoning that it will be about twenty four hours between leaving our Osaka hotel and walking in our front door.
But all that is OK. I like to travel, and these long travel days are sometimes the price of admission. I know that when it is all done I can have a long sleep in my own bed with a couple of grumpy (but secretly pleased to see us) cats.
I like Japan, and I would definitely come back. Nicole and I were just talking and we agreed that we would like to spend some more time in Tokyo now that we have more of a hang of transport and currency and all those basic things that vary from one place to the next. Tokyo was our first stop on this trip and it went past in a blur. So one day I am pretty sure that we will do all this again.
I am looking forward to getting back into the studio though, armed with all these pieces of paper I have been collecting across the last week and four cities. I didn't even bring a pair of scissors with me, so there has been no cutting and no collaging since before we left home. With any luck, the callouses on my scissor hand have not softened too much.
I have managed some work while we have been away though. Lots of photography for one thing. Landscapes and street textures. Hopefully they will come in handy at some point. And I did have some Midjourney credits to use up before they expired so I made a whole new series of Digital Decay works while travelling on the coach between places. They still need some tweaking and some more editing, but I will get to that soon enough.
I have also been day-dreaming about rearranging the studio, changing the layout to make things more accessible and improve my workflow. As much as I would like to do that though, it seems like a big job and more of an inconvenience than anything else. I think I will end up filing that under "One Day".
For now though, it is just about getting through today without losing my shit, or losing my shit.
Twenty hours to go...
Osaka Slaps
A couple of pics of stickers that I snapped around Osaka in the last couple of days.
An odd assortment of recent listening from the albums saved to my phone, in an attempt to avoid streaming using up all my international roaming data.
Stratosphere - Tangerine Dream