Today is Monday the 4th and I still haven’t had a chance to post anything since NYE! You’ll all get inundated with several posts at once at this rate!
We headed out on another big drive today, back towards Mt Fuji, this time with Naoko’s younger brother Manabu along for the ride, and with a specific location and purpose in mind!
We were headed to Gottemba Premium Outlets. A mecca of commercial consumerism, set against the back drop of picturesque Mt Fuji, which even made an appearance from behind the clouds for the later half of the day!
The drive was almost the same as yesterday except this time I got to experience a good 45 minutes on the highway! I may have mentioned before that the old saying that Japanese are good at following the rules, does not count on the road, nowhere does this hold more true than the highway.
Technically speaking the speed limit is 80ks, in reality this seems to denote the minimum expected speed that one should be doing if not in a traffic jam. Several times it was indicated by a car tailgating me that at 120 kph I was going far too slowly. I think the fastest I noticed someone going was probably around 170 or so. I was going fairly quickly and that car just flew by like I was standing still! This was what was expected in the outside lane, though technically illegal. Jeremy Clarkson from “Top Gear” probably didn’t need that mask when trying to avoid speeding cameras in japan! I think someone turned them off and sent the traffic cops home for New Year.
We got to the shopping complex just after 11 and didn’t leave until 5. The complex was huge, I think that there were more shops there than in all of Nelson!
Between the three of us we did a good job of helping to pay the wages of the army of staff brought in every day from the surrounding areas.
Naoko and I went shares in a new Nikon SLR digital camera which I hope I can share some photos from with everyone soon, I got a nice coat finally, something to wear to work over a suit on those cold days that we seem to get in Wellington once in a while…
Manabu picked out a couple of nice casual shirts that we gifted to him for Christmas and his birthday, it’s the same day but we thought we’d be kind and give him two gifts anyway!At around 3 pm we realised we had done so much shopping that we’d forgotten to have lunch so we ate at a place serving chinese food just off from the food court, I think the location was what made it so much more appealing.
After that we took a good hour to check one last street that we had missed on our way in, and having finally had enough of brands like Gucci, Armani, Ralph Laureen, YSL, Prada, Swarovski, GAP etc, not to mention the Japanese brands too, we headed for home at high speeds again!
This evening we watched Salt on dvd on the new big screen that was Naoko’s dads present to himself for new years.
Now it’s time to sleep before more driving and shopping tomorrow, and hopefully booking our seats on the bullet train to Kyoto!
Lastly the attached photo is a small view of Mt Fuji when it appeared from behind the clouds! It was surprising how close it actually was!
Talk to you all again soon!
Ps: if there are weird blue lines on your screen when you read this I have no idea why, they just appeared amongst the txt on my phone and I can’t get rid of them!