Back in Business!

Now yours truly has relocated back to his lair in central Tokyo and found no traces of any of those nasty little coackroaches so it seems like my acts of chemical warfare scared them away for the time being, and scared they should be!

The meetings in Bangkok were of the more fruitful variant with interesting content and not the long-winded utterly boring meeting that I have plenty of experience of since earlier. Also always nice to meet and talk "shop" with some of my Asian colleagues.

However, the fun obviously started when Ms. Sunshine arrived to keep me company and together we managed to spend 3 days of vacation there as well in blistering heat and even though I consider myself to be quite an experienced traveller I still managed to get us ripped off on several occasions through those shrewd tuktuk drivers. Since the living standard for the common people in Bangkok are pretty far below that of Japan I generally don't mind tipping generously towards friendly and reasonable people, but I get immensly annoyed by those who try to rip me off.

Also, on at least two occasions Ms. Sunshine managed to be mistaken to be my Thai "holiday girlfriend" and also be taken for a Canadian at one point (?!).

The question "where are you from?" seems simple enough, but can create annoying complexities when we are travelling together. A reply of "We're from Japan" usually generates a stare at me and a blunt "you don't look Japanese". But if I switch tactics and answer "we're from Sweden and Japan" I usually get a "you don't look Swedish, you look like Chinaman". By the end me and Ms. Sunshine decided to say that we're from Canada to further confuse them.

But now I'm back and thankfully Japan managed to cool down a bit in my absence!