Goin' home. Woke up at 7am on the 22nd. I'll start this entry with a little disclaimer. I found something out about myself at the conclusion of this trip. I cannot sleep on planes. I'm writing this blog at 4pm on the 23rd, and I've had 15 minutes sleep since 7am yesterday. After we check out of the Gimmond Hotel, we are officially homeless, until we arrive back in Australia. We packed all of the bags in the configuration which they are going to be checked in at the airport. We finalised the bill at the Gimmond, and we left our bags with them so we could kill the day in Kyoto without having to lug them around and kill ourselves. My pack weighed 27kg, Veronica's weighed 18, another bag which we bought a few days ago to carry all of the extra junk we bought now weighs nearly 20kg. It was going to be hard enough making it to the train, let alone walking around all day with that weight. Again we headed to the shopping district of Kyoto as it is large and interesting enough to keep us amused for another few hours. With nothing in particular to do we slowly browsed all of the shops. Supermarkets seem to be the only shops in Japan where it isn't customary to smile or be polite. Usually, in every other shop we entered we were greeted with a loud and happy Irasshai Massen! which is Japanese for welcome. But at supermarkets, the women on the checkouts are sour faced, and dont even offer a greeting. And it wasn't just to us as foreigners either. We watched for a while, and every customer on every queue was getting the same treatment. At the supermarket we stocked up on nibbles for the plane, as well as a 1.5 litre bottle of Pocari Sweat to take home as a souvenier. We also bought a few novelty 135ml beers to take home for a few laughs, as well as a couple of 500ml beers as samplers (mostly because they are so much cheaper than if they were purchased in Australia). After we were done with shopping, we returned back to the hotel, to have one last meal at the vending machine restaurant. It will be missed. We returned to the hotel to collect our insanely heavy bags, and headed for the subway. Struggled onto the moderately crowded subway, and got off at Kyoto station, and made what would be our last train change for the trip. We boarded the comfortable Limited Express train to travel directly from Kyoto station to Kansai airport in Osaka. We got through the airport, thankfully with trolleys to carry our bags, and waited for the check-in counter to open up. While we waited, we made use of the Starbucks at the airport terminal, which was the same excellent starbucks quality, albeit with a slightly inflated airport price. Starbucks in Australia is terrible. Their coffee tastes like finely grained gravel floating in hot water and battery acid. Surprisingly though, coffee from the Japanese Starbucks cafes is excellent. It is also very, very cheap. The largest size, a Venti, which is about the size of a medium sized bucket, costs about $4. After Starbucks we still had a small amount of Yen left to use, so we bought some Japanese porcelain dolls that Veronica wanted. Undoubtedly we could have bought them cheaper outside the airport, but they were quite cheap anyway, and if we didn't use the yen it would probably have just travelled home to Australia and been put in a drawer. After the dolls we were left with exactly 215 yen, which was enough to buy a 120 yen coke out of a vending machine, and leave us with 95 yen which was absolutelly worthless at the airport, as even the keyrings started at 100 yen. We were hearded onto the plane, and found our seats. As it was now 10pm it was pitch black, and it didn't take long after take-off for the lights to go dim, and for everyone to get comfortable and to go to sleep. Except me. Charlotte fell asleep with no problems, but Angela on the other hand struggled to sleep. She wouldnt sleep unless she was held, and for some reason she wanted me, not Veronica, so I spent the next 6 hours with her sleeping on my lap. Every time I moved a muscle, she would wake up and scream, waking the whole plane, so I had to simply lock my arms into position, and sit there. Time passes very slowly when you have to sit in one position unable to move. Very slowly. Somehow I survived without going insane, and the pilot announced that we would soon be making our descent into Brisbane for our stopover, just as the sun was coming up. We touched down, and made our pointless 1 hour Brisbane stopover. When we got off the plane, we had to go through the entire bag check procedure again, before being allowed to go through to the airport departure lounge cafeteria. Shops such as red rooster, subway, a coffee shop and a doughnut shop were absolutely useless to us, because there was not enough time to order anything before we were called back to the plane. Veronica ordered and paid for some coffees as soon as we got to the cafeteria, and the boarding call was made for us to re-board the plane before the coffee shop had even started to make our coffee. Got the money back from the unimpressed coffee woman, and headed for the plane again. Again we took off for the short 1hr 15min flight to Sydney. Through the thorough customs check at Sydney airport, and headed to the carousel to collect our bags. We got most of the bags, but our umbrellas didn't appear. We waited until all of the bags were collected, and assuming that they had been lost, we headed for the queue to exit the bagage claim area. A sniffer beagle circled me, and sniffed me a little, but he must have decided that I wasn't a terrorist and moved on. Instead he took a fascination with the bag of an old Japanese woman beside me, and the customs official tore her bag apart looking for food or drugs or something. Nothing was found, but the poor woman was left to pack her bag by herself, with no offer to help repack it by the customs person that made the mess to begin with. Because of the umbrella delay, we were now at the end of a very very long queue. It seems that 3 plane loads of people were all coming through the gates at once. So we queued, and waited. All the while wondering who had stolen our 2 valuable umbrellas. We were eventually interviewed by a short rude woman who wanted to know what food we were carrying. Once she had ascertained that we were carrying no fruit or vegetables, we were allowed to go to the express queue. We found out from the official manning the express queue that the umbrellas would be in the "bulky items" collection point. Umbrellas bulky? There was about 6 queues to choose from, but our friendly official told us to go down the left aisle. The only "left" aisle I could see was the one that bypassed the baggage checks completely, and led straight to the exit gates. When I queried him, he confirmed that he was giving us a free pass out of there, so we didn't argue. We got some interesting looks from the other people who had obviously been waiting in the queues for quite some time waiting for their bags to be pulled apart. They were no doubt wondering who we paid off to be able to simply walk around the inspection point. So in the end we could have bought through as much duty free items, alcohol, or infact any other items we cared to bring in, because our main bags were never checked. The crew from the TV show "Border Security" were filming the queues, but by bypassing the queues we didn't get to be on the show. No loss. And so ends the trip. 33 days in a culture very different from the one we are used to in Australia. We have seen some beautiful sights that we will remember for the rest of our lives, and have seen more of Japan than I ever thought would be possible in one single trip, especially with 2 young children in tow. It was an incredible trip, and I am sad that it is complete, but I am also relieved. Japan is such an exciting place to visit, because it is such a different experience to what we are used to in Australia. The culture is different, the scenery is different, the food is different and life in general is different, which makes it such a fantastic experience. After 33 days however, those things which seemed to new and alien to us at the beginning of the trip began to feel "normal". The aspects of Japan which really opened our eyes when we first got there were now just a normal part of daily life, and this was a good signal that it was time to return home. We will definitely be back though, and Japan delivered everything I had hoped on this holiday. I would love to see Okinawa, or perhaps spend a week or two in Hokaido in the winter, to catch the winter festival in Soporo. Sayonara Japan. It's been fun.