Exercise, food and dentists

So life goes on. 

Boys still need exercise. Hence we took them for a ride down our local "river" this morning. Waterways are great in Tokyo. There are heaps of them criss-crossing the city and mostly they have paths on both sides of them - perfect for walking, jogging, walking the dog or riding.

People still need feeding. So the CRASH command centre down the road still needed volunteers this morning to help feed all their volunteers, and I went down and helped. They ended up with left-overs, some of which came home with me, so that helped feed my mob tonight.

See the glass to the left of the picture?

Teeth still need care. One of our Spring Break (for non-Americans this is a one week school holiday at the end of March) tasks was to go for our annual dental check-up. Today was it. But I have to elaborate a bit on that one, because it was a bit different to an Australian dental experience (I cannot compare it to any other country, not having had dental treatment anywhere else).

Quite possibly our family gives the dental clinic an experience not very usual for them either. When my husband rang up to make an appointment, they remembered us - even though it has been close to two years since we've visited them!

One cool thing about this dental clinic is the view. There are floor to roof windows opposite the dental chairs facing out on this view of the train station. No curtains! And yes, it means that if you wanted to you could stand on the platform and stare at the dental clientele, but Japanese aren't prone to staring. And the train rushes past the clinic too fast to recognise anyone.

The first thing you need to know is that there are no little one-on-one rooms where you see a dentist. I think this clinic has about 20 complete "stations" where a dentist can see you. Each "station" is separated by a low wall that you cannot see over when in the chair.

We went as a group, as we usually do. Maybe that is why they remember us, not only a foreign family but coming in as a group - who does that? Our reasoning is that it is just more time efficient to get us all done at once. But they called us all in at the same time and put the boys in three adjacent "stations". You can see my husband in the blue above helping our eldest to understand what was happening (his Japanese isn't that great). So the three boys were seen serially. The dentist saw one, ordered an x-ray (which someone else took care of), saw the next, ordered and x-ray and saw the last (but no x-ray - this is the one who is too young to clean his own teeth). And then went back to the beginning again, doing what he had to do. After all the boys were done we had our chance. Two parents on the chairs while the boys looked on with a great deal of amusement.

What amused the staff was the amount of questions we were fielding, granted it was done mostly in English which they didn't understand, but when I explained they laughed. It was harder to field questions once the instruments were in our own mouths, though! Thankfully no-one needed a filling this time. Only two baby teeth pulled and some scaling of the adult's teeth.

Tonight I'm having the pleasure of watching and listening to cricket. It is the semi final of the Cricket World Cup in India and Sri Lanka. A balm to my soul - the sound of cricket commentary and the crowd...I love it! The only thing wrong is that the season is wrong. I should be in shorts and a tee-shirt!

And just in case you think I'm on holidays, I've been sorting out editing tangles off and on amidst all the other things today. It isn't easy working with stories by people who don't usually write for magazines and editors who aren't very familiar with Japan. Nor helpful is the fact that my attention is pretty fragmented. I don't seem to be able to string together a decent length of time to concentrate on it. Therefore I've made mistakes, started things and not completed them and have a whole lot of loose ends to tie up sometime soon. Hopefully after the boys go back to school (Lord willing) on Monday I'll be able to knuckle down a lot better.

Ah, but for now, back to following the cricket and doing some stitching.