Anyway, I won't take the laptop, so no updates. Well, unless I buy a new one, which I have been thinking of!

Actually, I have had a very busy weekend! I met Glenn on Friday night for what was supposed to be a glorious, two-hour, all-you-can-eat Brazilian Steak feast, but the restaurant was booked, so we settled for Tony Roma's (another first for me in Japan, by the way). Afterward, we had a few drinks at Legends in Roppongi before I rushed to make my last train.

Saturday morning I woke up early and was back on the train to go to Mito-san's barbecue in Izumi Tamagawa by 10am. If you time the journey right, it is about an hour and a half trip. At Fujisawa, If you accidently get on the local train instead of the express it is closer to two hours. Unfortunately, I wasn't exactly in the best condition for making judgement calls. In any case, I made it. I wish I could have stayed longer, but Max had invited me to the sumo tournament so after a short stay I was off to ride the rails some more.

The Tokyo-based sumo tournaments are held at the arena in Ryougoku. It is my first visit to the area and I would like to go back and explore some more. The Tokyo-Edo museum is also there and seems to be worth a visit. Anyway, we had amazing seats courtesy of Max's friend Takako. In the left-hand picture below, she is on the left and that is Max in the middle.

We were in row six, which is in the "sunakaburi" seats and basically means that you are in range of the salt that the wrestlers throw around to purify the ring. In practical terms, it means that you cannot eat anything there. On the other hand, we all got these giant bags of food when we left to make up for it. The right-hand side picture is advertising...they would circle the ring on an irregular basis.

Sumo is very complicated so I am not even going to try and explain it. But, I will leave you one more picture of the sumo wrestlers lining up before the start of their matches.

After it finished, Max and I went to Hub in Korakuen for a few drinks and once again I ended up on a late night train home. Today...I have nothing planned. Woo!

I took a few pictures on the way. This is from the Sun&Shine 35 Cafe in Shichirigahama. That was the first time for me, and I really liked it. I ordered a hamburger and it was very tasty. Woo!

Like I mentioned, we ended up at Enoshima and once we got there we went to another place that I have been meaning to go to. It is a coffee house on the hill above the shrine that has some pretty good views...here it is. I forgot the name, sorry. By the way, the coffee is good.

I got home around sunset, so I went over to the beach and took a few pictures that absolutely didn't come out. It WAS a very nice sunset though...sorry that you missed it.

Keeping with the theme of things not working out as I hoped, I went over to the grocery store around 8:30pm and did a bit of shopping for breakfast. I was getting very excited about tomorrow morning until I got to the register and realised that I forgot to bring my wallet. I mean I never go anywhere without my wallet...but for some reason, tonight I did. It looks like I will be eating oatmeal tomorrow morning.

Anyway, there were food and drink booths in the open area at the main entrance and two stages, one inside the main temple and one in the garden out back. The temple is surrounded by trees so it feels very isolated, although they did have to lower the volume because the neighbours behind the trees complained!

We arrived around 3pm and stayed until 8pm or so, but I could have stayed longer. For the last part of the day we mostly hung out in the main temple, listening to the music. Because it was a DJ, I did not feel compelled to watch the stage and could check out all the other people instead. It was very relaxing and a big change from the usual day/night out in Japan (at least for me!)

Anyway, here is the beach yesterday...

And here is the sunset...

Today is also looking great...I spent an hour on the beach this morning. Woo hoo!

Like I promised, I took my camera along and shot a few pictures on the beach. Once I started drinking, I forgot about the camera, so there are not any pictures from the evening.

The bar closed at 11pm, but nobody seemed to be in a rush to go home and I was out pretty late. Not much else to say really...I had a bit of a hangover yesterday, which is one reason why I did not write anything until now! Hard to believe I have to wait 10 months to order a beer on the beach.

Of course, last week's daily rain has been replaced by sunny days. Now that the beach houses are gone. Arrgghh.

In hindsight, that might have been a bad idea. On the other hand, I had fun and met lots of cool people AND after tomorrow the beach bars will be gone. Furthermore, there was an afterparty that I skipped. The fact I am writing this is evidence that I have some willpower!

Anyway, tomorrow is the last day of summer. I will take the camera.

It did give me a taste of what it will be like living here from September. I better get a hobby quick.

Anyway, I took my camera out to the beach this morning. Really, I am not sure when I stopped doing things like that. Probably around the same time I stopped updating this blog. For today, anyway, a return to normalcy.

Here are some random boats secured off the jetty on the south side of the beach. That is the Denny's side for those of you who know the difference. You can clearly see Enoshima off to the right and there is a ghostly Mt. Fuji barely visible above it, at least in the original file.

Having said that, London was fun. I met up with lots of friends! As usual, I drank too much the first night I was there, but meeting everyone I has not seen in the last year tends to do that (thanks for organising everything John!).

I stayed with Leigh and Nicky most of the time and they were kind of enough to take me to the last England-South Africa test match. I have seen cricket before, but this was the first test match and also my first time to The Oval. We had brilliant seats the first day, although the people in the picture on the right had a pretty good view as well considering they were outside the ground. Then again, they probably had a hard time getting a 7-pound pint of Pimm's...poor bastards.

As you can imagine, I also have spent a lot of time at the beach. Lots of people have come down to visit and that's been very nice. Unfortunately, the beach season ends next week. What will I do for the next ten months! If you have a chance to make it to Zushi Beach, please stop by the Happy Go Lucky Beach Bar, just to the right of the main entrance to the beach. Everyone there is super nice and it is a good spot to relax. You can kind of see it in the picture on the right below...it is the bar with the grass cone for a roof.

I went to Nuala's housewarming party last night and I have never seen such a lovely house. The party was good too. On a final note, despite it being the end of August it has become quite cool in Zushi. I am talking about the weather, and not the it-is-a-more-popular-place-because-I-moved-here sense. One good thing to come out of that is this blog entry.

Actually, I went to Hayama during the day. i took this picture of a small beach yakisoba stand in front of the Imperial grounds. I did not eat there or anything, but it is one of the few things I had yet to take a picture of, so there you go.

We went back to the train station around 4pm and there were already loads of people heading to Zushi Beach to save their spot for watching the fireworks. As a result, I rushed back home and grabbed my beach gear and went out to find a place. From nowhere, this summer storm appeared, but no one seemed daunted as you can see below.

Eventually, we all settled in. And the fireworks were awesome. It all seemed to be very close. I have never taken a good picture of fireworks, but this should give you an idea of how it looked.

Tonight is also the Zushi Fireworks and I am really looking forward to that. Last year, we watched it from the rooftop of my building, but this time around I am going to go the beach early and save a spot. I hope it all comes off OK. I am heading over at 5pm, which is almost three hours beforehand, so that should give me plenty of time.

I really like fireworks. And bars on the beach.

I took this at the beach yesterday. It is not really a big deal for me because I have been going everyday this summer, but I talked to Yoko the other day and she said I should update this. So...this is for all of you that are sitting in your cubicles reading this. I thought you might want to see what you are missing.

It really has been a lovely summer so far. There was hardly any rain in rainy season and despite the sun being out everyday it has not been unbearably hot. Well, at least not on the beach! Maybe being able to go for a swim whenever it suits me helps. Or could it be the cooling ocean breeze?

Well, it is going to be good beach weather this weekend too. I will try to take some pictures.

I am trying to recall the most memorable times I have had here, but I keep getting stuck on the last two years. Really, my life has changed so much since I stopped working and all those hours in the office, airports and meetings that made up my first six years have kind of blurred together.

Anyway, no fancy pictures or amazing insights this time around.

I will be glad when the whole process is finished. I spent the last week slowly going through and packing everything to make sure I would throw away the things that I did not need. Since the Zushi pad is half the size of my Tokyo apartment, it was necessary. It was kind of sad to see a lot of the stuff that I had collected over the last eight years get thrown away. Which reminds me, this is exactly eight years! I guess I should write about that separately.

Anyway, I hate packing and I hate moving, so this has been a real trial. But it is almost over and if I move back to Tokyo, none of the things here will be moved up there! So, hopefully, this is my last move in Japan!

Speaking of which, I have one year left on my visa and actually I am not really sure of that because I have no idea what the local city office will say when I tell them I have no job. They tend to frown on that in Japan for some reason. We'll see.