A fun night out

Last night we stepped of our comfort zone (which is: staying quietly at home on a Friday night and going to bed at a usual time). Instead, on the eve of our 28th wedding anniversary, we went out on a Friday night and had fun. 

Start of the women's 200m.

It's five years since the Tokyo Olympics were supposed to happen and four years since they did and we sat at home in Tokyo watching events happen in our own city that we had had tickets for! Last night we went to the National Stadium (the main Olympic stadium—22 km from our place) to watch a session of the World Athletics Championships.

It was a lot of fun. I feared that part of it might be slow, but they kept us entertained for five hours! I only left my seat once. At times it was hard to know where to look. At one point there was women's javelin, women's decathlon shot put (both of which were down our end of the stadium) and some 800m and 5,000m races all happening at the same time, during which the male triple jumpers were also warming up. So much going on and so impressively organised. I love going to orchestral concerts because they are visually an absolute feast, and this was the same, so many things to watch.

When you are at an event like this in person there are so many things you can see that don't get shown on TV, like how they get the javelins and shots back to the athletes (remote cars for the former and a ramp for the latter). There was also a cool dude on a motorised unicycle on the track taking video of the runners in the back straight (the video you'll be seeing on TV). The choreography that went into putting out and removing the hurdles was also impressive.

The weather was also gorgeous. Finally the fiercely hot and humid Tokyo summer is in the past and we've entered into delightful early autumn. It was neither hot nor cold last night, even as we walked home at midnight.

A lot of the 58,000 people in the stadium were Japanese; you could tell that merely from the noise when their athletes were introduced or competing. We discovered that the reigning female World Champion in javelin is Japanese and we watched her strive last night to qualify for the finals in the competition to defend her crown. She didn't qualify, unfortunately, but she was well cheered for by the crowd.

This was early in the evening when 
the stands weren't so full, by the end
of the session at 10.30 there weren't
many spare seats near us.

But it was an international event and there were many foreigners too. Many more than we are used to seeing. Later, when we got on a train to go home, I watched a Japanese guy, probably on his way home from a work event, look in amazement at the large influx of people onto his train, many of whom were talking (not something common on trains), and not all in Japanese. He was sitting in front of where I was standing and craning his neck to see if he could tell which station we'd all gotten on at (he'd probably been napping). 

I'd not been looking forward to the trip home. I've had some very uncomfortable, overly crowded experiences late at night on Tokyo trains (and some not so great ones getting home from sporting events in Brisbane too). This wasn't so bad, though getting out of the stadium was a tad confusing, when the route we'd taken to get in was closed. The staff redirected us along different routes, largely by shouting at us in Japanese through hand-held speaker horns. But once we found the station, it was okay and many passengers got off our train fairly quickly and I ended up having a seat for much of the trip home, which was a good thing because I was definitely drooping at 11.45 on a Friday night!

Enjoying where we live

Despite having lived here for 20 years I think it's only just dawning on me that I live in this nation's capital! And that a lot of cool international-type things happen here. To those who see Japan as a travel destination, a place to see the sights and do the fun things, it might seem weird. But we live in Japan, we're not on holidays here and, like most people in the place they live, we don't do much tourism. 

And also, when we first arrived in Tokyo we had three boys under seven, and for a long time we just hunkered down and did what needed to be done. Rarely did we venture out to events that weren't part of our immediate circle. We didn't have the energy to go to events or take the family out for travel adventures. Most of our outings were, in the early years, to parks, and later (since 2010), many of our Saturdays were consumed by interschool sport.

But on the other hand, some people might also find it weird that missionaries do any tourism at all. Before we came to Japan we were given some excellent advice about missionary life. We were told to try to be as present as you can, where you are; to enjoy things you couldn't do elsewhere. That doesn't mean we love everything about Japan and only eat Japanese food, but it does mean that we'll happily enjoy an international event like the World Athletics Championships when they come to town. By the way, it also means that we rarely eat Japanese food in Australia, and we do our best to enjoy being present in Australia too.

We'd also been advised by a psychologist, as we approached having all our kids leave home, that we should spend more time enjoying ourselves! We're a pretty good team, but fun hasn't always been easy to do. I'd like to think that we've made some progress on that front in the last couple of years. And last night surely qualifies!