Another Sunday Afternoon in an Airport Lounge - but it is the last one!

Another bus trip today out to Narita airport heading for a four day week in Bangkok. It has been three weeks since I was last there - I am slowly breaking out of the every second week routine :-)

The movers packed our house yesterday - all 151 boxes of it. It took them from 9 in the morning until 6.30 at night - 4 guys in the morning and 6 in the afternoon. Hard to believe we left for the UK 11 years ago with just 2 suitcases. We got rid of the couches before we moved this time - their mildew stained appearance was just not doing it for me and I wanted them gone. We'll have to go shopping in Hong Kong for a new one pretty quickly or we will end up sitting on the floor. I'll post pictures of the new apartment in Hong Kong once we move in, but it does not unfortunately have the spectacular views we had in our last HK place. We decided this time that space was more important to us than views, and so net curtains will be a must unless we want to get very intimate with our neighbours! The apartment is brand new however, so should be nice to live in. It has three bedrooms so we will once again have a guest room - will be good for when Jordan and Braden come to visit.

The biggest hassle in the whole move has definitely been the cat. She requires an export certificate to get her out of Japan and an import certificate to get her into Hong Kong. In addition she needed fresh vaccinations two weeks before we travelled and a health certificate from the vet. I have to visit the quarantine office here at the airport to get her a final check over on our way out of the country, and then she gets passed over to the cargo handling company for loading onto my flight to Hong Kong. When she gets to Hong Kong she gets sent to the Quarantine office in the Cargo building where all going well we can just pick her up. I guess on the positive side, at least she does not need to stay in quarantine for weeks like she will have to when we bring her to NZ.

Closely following the cat for sheer inconvenience have been the car and motorbike. Neither are easy to sell in Japan - Japanese do not like second hand vehicles at the best of times, and buying off a foreigner who does not speak Japanese is not their idea of fun either. So we are shipping them both to NZ. If Andrew (it has to be him coz he is the ownership papers) can make it back to NZ at the same time the boat gets in, he will be able to save us paying the GST on the car as we have had it a year and so qualify for a 'concessionary' import based on our time out of NZ. The only thing is that if we do that we cannot sell the car for two years... so it will need to go into storage somewhere. Any takers? We pay good rates :-) At this stage we are expecting the car company to collect the car and bike next Saturday when I am back in Tokyo to do the final inspection and key hand over on the apartment. They will then wait in Japan until the end of March before being shipped.

Andrew and I had a quick holiday before the move up in Niseko and Sapporo in the north of Japan. It was booked last year, and so although the timing was not really very convenient we decided to just take it anyway and make the most of the last few days in Japan. We have some photos of the skiing in the Niseko and the Snow Festival in Sapporo on the camera - but unfortunately that is in the packing so we won't be able to post anything until we unpack again (should be the end of the month). Andrew ended up having to do quite a bit of work while we were away, but he still managed a day of skiing and had a nice few days.

Time to head for the plane - better not be left behind :-)

Sonia