Building a home

Imagine picking up, every single item in your home, relate to it and decide where it should live. You would be surprised how much history and how many memories each little item have captured for you. In the everyday life, the significance of the things tend to blur away on an unconscious level, but when you receive 126 collies of you personal stuff ( = nearly all your belongings) you have not seen for month and some cases years, you can not avoid to turn sentimental.

This Monday, all the leased furniture was removed so we spent the night at a hotel. Henrik had chosen Hananoyu. The hotel has several onsen (public baths), which we enjoyed both after dinner and again before breakfast. The men’s baths was located on the 10th floor with huge windows revealing a view of the snow-covered mountains. The women’s bath was on the ground floor, both inside and outside – and there were plenty of them. Ordinary pools, pools with natural stones, wood tree baths, very deep baths, and Barbara’s favourite, a huge ceramic pot, that only fitted one person and which was partly out side, so the snow landed on her cheeks while her body was gently heated by the steaming hot water. As always we stuck out of the crowd, so a private bath is nice.
The night at Hananoyu, was a break from reality and even though we first arrived there 7 o’clock in the evening and left again 7.30 the next morning, the time was plenty for getting this ‘holiday – away-from-it-all-pampering-feeling. Guess it is highly because of the baths.

The picture shows part of the dinner at Hananoyo...steak to eat with chopsticks!

Tuesday morning was a return to reality. Our ship freight arrived a little past nine and six hours later all 126 collies was opened and scattered around the apartment. One big mess! But a good mess though. Only some fragile lamps were damaged – and our Brazilian alcohol and French wines are missing, the rest was in good shape and it was a great feeling having our history in the hands again. :-D

Two days have passed since the stuff arrived, and everything is still a mess. We need to build shelves for the books etc, but we are facing a few challenges; like the battery for the drilling machine from Denmark needs several days to charge because of the 100 V in Japan versus 220 V in Denmark; how to find a new television set with an English menu system; and the language difficulties when we want to buy materials for building the shelves.

We hope the weekend will bring us a lot closer to the target. Henrik has taken the day off Friday, so by Monday we should have something that reminds of a home again. Including a guest room, should anyone wonder.