It's The O-bon Holidays- so what am I doing in this office?

It's O'bon, the yearly summer holiday where many people return to their hometowns to meet relatives, attend festivals and honour their ancestors. Many businesses are closed or working at reduced capacity. NAIST has most of the week off — not even the cafeteria is open — and plenty of people didn't show up last Friday either.

I have three days off too, but I've chosen not to use them now. Instead I'll take those three days toward the end of September. Together with a couple of national holidays it will give me over a week off, enough time that we can fly to Sweden to visit my parents and meet my new niece.

So I'm at work. Not quite alone but nearly so. On the upside it's quiet and relaxing, and there's no seminars or meetings or anything to distrupt you. Even the closed cafeteria has a silver lining: I brought oatmeal, milk and a banana for lunch instead of the usual cafeteria fare. Japanese aren't much for porridge in general so I rarely eat this at home, but now I get to indulge for a couple of days.

Time off or not it's still O-bon, though, and like previous years we're sun-drying our umeboshi. It's a good time for it; the weather is hot and sunny and there is less traffic on the streets.

So Quiet

It's Obon, when most Japanese take time off and hit the road to go back to their hometowns, see old relatives and visit the family grave. Which means that out there is a circus of backed-up traffic, overflowing trains and frayed nerves right in the hottest part of summer, with the first typhoon of the season making landfall across half the country. But in here it's cool, it's still, and it's so very quiet.

My mornings normally look something like the shot at the top. The picture at the bottom is from yesterday. Practically empty.

The reason being, I'm the only one at the office today. There's a couple of heavy deadlines breathing down my neck, so I'm not taking any time off this year. A lone doctoral student was working over in the common room yesterday, but today I'm all by myself.

This suits me just fine right now. I like having people around, but when alone I can sit and argue loudly with myself, play music when I feel like it, and generally act out. It helps me focus when I'm stressed, and right now I need all the focus I can get.

I miss Obon, though. Last year we saw the World Press Photo exhibition, dried our homemade umeboshi and went up Rokko mountain in Kobe for sightseeing and dinner. No such fun this year.

I did manage to help Ritsuko spread out the umeboshi to dry this morning. And we'll be meeting friends for dinner tonight, so Obon's not all devoid of fun this year.