Keeping it in the Family

Oh, Sunday. You're so very grey today. And windy. Do you think you're in Wellington? Because you're not. You should sort that out.

The sky is grey and I am blue because I have just bid (bidded? Biddybid) farewell to my dear father after a positive whirlwind of a three day visit. He came, he saw, he made positive comments about the public transport systems.

How did I know it was my Dad and not, like, Tonks? Or Mystique? Because during his first steps outside in Japan, his first look at the streets of Sapporo, his first question was - 'What are those?":

... "Hey, look Dad! A shrine! A geisha! Buddah! GODZILLA!... You still want to know what the stumpy pipes protruding from all the buildings are...? Ok, fine." (FYI, I took these photographs to school and asked the teachers in my office what they were, because my Dad wanted to know, and they exchanged sideways glances which said "So that's why she eats raw mung beans by the packet and has hair that's longer on one side than the other and walks with her head tilted to the right so that it's less obvious and reads Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban every lunchtime without fail, GENETICS" and, just in case your breath is, like, bated, like mine was, they're heating vents).

Did Dad clean my bathroom with a toothbrush? No, he did not. Unhelpful. But we bonded. Oh, we bonded. We even went on a FATHER DAUGHTER BIKE-RIDE which we haven't done since I was, oh, knee-high to a short person, and we got a full 500 metres down the road before the back tyre on my poor fivemonthsinthesnowmorerustthanactualbike bike blew with the violence of a sneeze and left Dad standing sheepishly on the side of the road and a nearby construction worker laughed and laughed at the hapless foreigner and Fancy Nancy smiled smugly between my legs (lulz).

Dad wasn't in Japan for long, so he didn't get many opportunities to see things, but he did put lots of things in his mouth.

Did I mention he's a PhD? I did? Good.

Anyway, it was certainly a short a visit, but we managed to pack it full of fun. We went to a temple. We ate yakitori. We went up the TV tower. We visited department stores. We went to a park. We drank many many litres of Sapporo. Dad partook of his first sushi train. The waitress was so flustered by Dad's handsomeness that she offered to take a photo of his first Japanese sushi experience: