I was dispatched to Japan on business with about three working days notice. Today I had a half-day free between landing on Monday, meetings in places that are not close together*, and returning to the UK tomorrow morning.
I visited Byōdo-in in Uji on the advice of a colleague:
* By my reckoning I’ve travelled 1293 km in 9 hours and 20 minutes over three days for ¥37640 (about £188) by train, as well as taking three taxis and a bus, all while jet-lagged. As well as the 14 hour flight to get to Japan in the first place!
Every time though, I wonder if it is the last time I go skiing in the alps.
While this winter has been very cold across many parts of central europe and snow has been a real issue in many parts of Germany… the Swiss alps have had extremely low snowfall this year.
I was really surprised how well they were able to prepare the slopes despite the lack of snow. They only have a very finite amount of artificial snow they can make from their local reservoir and at the time we were there it was already half emptied for the year.
We had four sunny days though and in the middle of winter that is something to be treasured. Every year I don’t get my week in the snow, something is missing.
On top of everything on our way home we were able to visit the factory (and outlet) of our favorite Swiss chocolate producer and bought a bunch of slightly unpretty chocolate at half price
Took a walk along the Rhine today. Water is 1m above average right now. The wave is already downstream near Koblenz where they are at 2m above average. The 4th image in the bottom right corner shows a huge “Polder” for flood protection. When I was about 3 years old there was flooding here so bad the Autobahn got flooded. Since then many such areas have been created that can be flooded if necessary and hold back a lot of water.
Actually the top left image is part of an Altrheinarm. The river was not originally going in a straight line here. The river bed of today was created in the 19th century. There are lots of pieces of the original river next to it which are great moscito breeding grounds.
Lots of shipping traffic today. The thing spewing “it is only clean steam” is our local coal plant🫠
The bridge is under constant renovation because there is too much traffic across because for various political reasons I sympathize but disagree with (especially seeing the consequences now) the 2nd bridge was never built. Mistakes are made.
Douglas Adams talked about the ‘shoe event horizon’, where a society becomes so depressed and degenerate that it is economically impossible to build anything but shoe shops.
These are the shops on our road. A tattoo parlour is surrounded by a barber (closed down), a barber (opening), a hair salon, a hair salon and a hair salon. Opposite this picture is a hair salon. The next block of shops has three hair salons, and there are two hair salons on the next street.
