My trivial thinking

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m happy to have finished all my work for the year. I’m relaxing now, sitting back and listening to music. Seiko Matsuda’s 1996 song “Missing You” is really good.   You can easily find the English version of the song on YouTube. I’ve heard that she can be a bit eccentric. Many men adore her, while many women don’t like her very much. But I like this song. Enjoy!

 The year before last, my daughters took my wife and me to Beijing for our wedding anniversary, and last year they took us to Okinawa as a birthday present for me. This year, Yumi and my wife, Kazuyo, wanted to visit the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa ( http://www.kanazawa21.jp/en/ ). We decided that this time each of us would pay our own way. it wasn’t meant to be a present for me.  We left early in the morning on October 30 and drove to Kanazawa via the Meishin and Hokuriku Expressways. We arrived at the museum at 10 a.m. It took about five hours from Osaka by car. Before visiting the museum, we went to Kenroku-en, one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan, located nearby ( http://www.pref.ishikawa.jp/siro-niwa/kenrokuen/e/about.html ). I had been there once a long time ago. There were many foreign tourists, and some Chinese tourists were speaking loudly. I wished they would speak more quietly.   After that, Yumi insisted that we go to Omich...

 You can’t travel for a month without money, and you certainly can’t withdraw cash from ATMs if something goes wrong. I kept wondering how anyone could get through a situation like that.  My daughter left for Europe alone at the beginning of this month. I’d been worried from the start because she doesn’t speak any English. Trouble happened immediately on the first day. She tried to withdraw money from an ATM at Heathrow Airport and failed. Then she flew to Malta and tried again, but the ATM there didn’t work either. For six days she wasn’t able to withdraw any money at all.  Yesterday afternoon she called me on Skype, crying. Her debit card had become invalid because she entered the wrong PIN several times. She called the bank that issued the card, but their response was cold: “The only solution is to reissue the card.”  I called the bank myself. My call was transferred three times, and in the end they simply gave me the phone number of a specific department and told...