"On The High Seas."
Friday 19 October. (continued). 7-45 pm.
Colin and I sat on chairs at a table in the lounge area of our deck. It felt very strange and rather sad to be on our own again. We hoped that Toshiharu, Shouko, and Ritsuko would be enjoying the peace and quiet occasioned by our departure.
We opened Shouko's bag of "goodies", and although we hadn't thought we were hungry, we drank the beer and ate some of the solid contents, two rice cakes each, some dried squid (Colin ate this), and the rice crisps. The cheese and the tea went back to Australia.
We had a letter from Ritsuko to open.
The letter was prettily titled "Let's Study Japanese" in large colourful letters. After the title came some sentences with blanks here and there. Anyway, you can see part of the letter below, though without the colours, alas. The sentences took us back through some of the memorable times we had had in Kanoya. We had to fill in the blanks with the right Japanese characters in hiragana.
At that time, Ritsuko intended to become a school teacher, and she was good at making up these sorts of puzzles. We enjoyed solving them.
The sea was rougher than on the previous voyage, and the ferry was rolling enough to make walking difficult for me.
Colin enjoyed the motion and found that by making an ascent of the stairs coincide with a plunge of the ship, he could go up from one deck to another with incredible ease.
The combination of the beer and the ship's motion made us feel sleepy, so we prepared for bed: only just in time, for the lights went off soon after we were in bed.
This time we were in a different dormitory; it was smaller, there were only twelve beds along one wall and eleven along the other. This room had carpet, not tatami, and the genkan area had shoe shelves. Also, each sleeping space had a shelf area at the head to put luggaga on. This cabin was much better than the other one we had been in.
This time on the ferry I didn't see any foreigners (i.e. non-Japanese).
During the night the ferry rolled, reared, and plunged, actually quite a lot. It was noisy to; we could hear the waves hitting the hull; but it wasn't scary, so we slept soundly.