Toilet Heaven!

What a difference a day makes.

Perhaps only someone still suffering a dose of Delhi Belly can fully appreciate the wonder and splendour that is japanese toilets!

These things do everything for you, incuding music, false flushing sounds, heated seats, washing, drying, and flushing themselves. Amazing, and I took it as a sign of an incredibly civilised people.

Everything here is quiet, polite, clean and efficient. Even the cars barely make a noise, there`s no litter, people don`t lock their bikes, they just leave them on the street because no-one would steal one. People speak softly and bow, and smile and respect your space and are generally just wonderful. Even the airport was a pleasant experience.

While here we visited the bay area, which is gorgeous. Went to a big Sega theme park including bobsled, plane, and white water rafting simulators, fortune telling, snow board rides - all sorts of arcade games - great fun. also the Toyota mega centre which included concept cars, old sports cars even a delorean like in Back to the Future, and of course a Lexus showroom, at which I nearly started crying about having to sell mine before we left. I`ll be in counselling for years to get over that car! The shopping malls here are crazy too.

So it`s only a few first impressions of Japan, but we`ve already delayed our flight out of here by another week so that we can spend 3 weeks here. Tomorrow we head out of the city and start our trip around the countryside and mountains. I can`t wait to see more.