light vessel automatic

1. On a nice day, this is what it looks like from the window of my living room (which I do actually live in).
2. On Sunday I got on the bike I have borrowed from Mrs.Y, who runs a shop on the island, and I rode around to a point where I could see the next island. This is what it looks like: like this.
3. This is the beach that everyone seems to go to for swimming in the daytime and barbecues at night. Last week I came here with a nice woman from the office and her family, and went snorkelling. Her son was back from senior high school on mainland Okinawa for Obon (Buddhist festival of the dead), and we went snorkelling. I chased lots of small blue fish, and a large grey one.
4. Taken from the same place as the view of the next island (above), a few minutes later and looking in a different direction.

東京から沖縄まで
from Tokyo to Okinawa

Things that went wrong on the way to Japan:

• The flight I was meant to be on was struck by lightning. So I was put on to an earlier flight, which meant:
  • I didn’t get to say goodbye to my family. They’d come to Heathrow to have lunch with me during the three-hour changeover.
  • I didn’t get to travel with Kim. The plane journey was going to be the last time we could spend any time together for the next few months.
• The travel agency told me the wrong hotel, so I ended having to lug my luggage for three blocks. To understand how bad a thing that is, you need to know that Tokyo in August is like a very, very hot greenhouse.

Things that went right:

• Got upgraded to first class…

I really only mention these because it seems so typical that a chain of extremely bad and good things should happen as a consequence of an aeroplane – which I never even saw – being struck by lightning.