Well here we are getting ready to depart for our holiday in China and Japan. So much has happened since the one who looks after the “B’s” dragged me down to House of Travel last June – who would have thought that the lead-up to takeoff would produce a few rocky bumps but they were negotiated successfully so here we are – currently surrounded by enough clothes to cover off everything from a heatwave to a snowstorm! I can see a few negotiations coming my way because the one in charge of the “B’s” can be stubborn at times. You would never have guessed that would you!*@#??

We leave for Beijing at midnight on Monday 7 May and, because we have come to realise that we are not 21 anymore, we have given ourselves two days to recover from that rather long trip. That’s good actually because we haven’t done much training on using the chopsticks – I have never been able to fathom how to eat rice with those sticks but I am planning on doing some YouTube tutorials to help us out with all that because on our last visit to Madam Woo I had trouble negotiating the lettuce salad!
We are pretty excited about going to the Great Wall, the Terracotta Warriors, the Three Gorges Dam Project on the Yangtze cruise, Tiananmen Square, Xian, Shanghai and I see we are even going to have to dress in our finest Chinese gear to attend a gala dinner – guess that means I need to drag the boss to a market with the millions to choose an outfit!! I am thinking that by the time we leave here we will be certified chopstick users – or the rice will be all over the floor! We have started watching Nobu’s Japan and Taste of Hong Kong because we got sick of waiting for Rick Stein to have a long weekend in Shanghai!

We fly to Tokyo after 16 days in China and begin our Japanese experience going to Five Lakes, Hakone, Mt Fuji, Himeji, Hiroshima, Miyajima Island, Kyoto and Osaka. Then Aidan and Jenny join us in Osaka and we go out of the cities and into the mountains for a week to Takayama and Kamikochi to the more relaxed pace of walks, bike rides, fishing and a cooking class. I need to check if we need to practise walking in platform wooden jandals with our sox on. I am just hoping the boss doesn’t make me put that white foundation all over my face and do up that big bow at the back of my dress! He wouldn’t would he?

You won’t be getting any more boring stuff to read until we arrive in Beijing and have had our first chopstick dinner because I know you will be excitedly waiting to hear how it went! Just remember – good things take time!