Follow - up

A couple of other thoughts have struck me, further to my trip described below.
1) Being able to brush my teeth using tap water, not the bottled stuff.
2) The luxury of being able to drink tap water. Well, luxury isn't the right word, but it's definitely something you can start to take for granted until that liberty is taken away from you!3) I saw on yahoo news today, that Sydney is going to impose an hour's powercut, to warn against global warming. In Vietnam, we experienced this first hand a few times. - Apparently there hasn't been enough rain lately in Hanoi, which means the electricity supply has gone down. So the government is deciding when to cut power in certain places for a couple of hours at a time. Twice in 9 days, we were without electricity for a few hours. Although this seemed to be a new thing! I know I've just experienced a mild winter with little snow here, as have other places, such as European ski resorts. But it was interesting & startling to be in a place where global warming was having an obvious knock-on effect in daily life. Seemed to bring the issue home somewhat.
4) Don't take traffic safety for granted! I thought it'd be a breeze returning to the ordered, regulated roads of Japan. But I was nearly hit by a car that didn't want to stop, as I cycled across the road on a green man, on my first day back to school. (Now, I know you're technically meant to dismount and walk across the road with a bike in Japan, but no-one does & I think cars should still stop, as they do 99.9% of the time). And then returning home that same day, I was thinking to myself how slow some girls seemed to be going in front of me. They kept applying the brakes, whereas I usually just career down the hill. And then one girl yelped a bit, before colliding with a car that was turning into the convenience store, and ending up on the bonnet! Thankfully both she and the car were going extremely slowly & she was OK, but she couldn't seem to stop quite in time. (I'm glad that she was OK, and also relieved I hadn't been in front of her/ tried to overtake!)
5) Japanese food tastes bland and doesn't include enough cashew nuts!