I got back to Belgium on Thursday night, went into work on Friday, and at last I have a bit of spare time to recover—and to write a bit here. My brain is still a bit jetlagged, which seems to adversely affect my language centres most of all. Speaking and writing are both a bit challenging right now.

I haven’t finished writing about my travels in Japan, but there’s quite a bit more to come. I have pages and pages of notes from my trips and some good photos. Maybe tomorrow...

I flew back from Osaka (KIX) to Brussels (BXL), changing at Frankfurt (FRA). As is always the way, the long-haul part was almost perfect, only to be let down by the short hop at the end.

At Frankfurt, five minutes after we were supposed to have started boarding the plane to Brussels, someone came out to tell us that there were technical problems, and that he would come back to us again in ten minutes to inform us whether or not the plane would be flying. In fact, a lot sooner than that—almost immediately he had finished the first announcement—he came back to deliver the good news: we would be taking off on time, and a bus was on its way to take us to the aircraft.

And so, after a ten-minute bus ride to the farthest, here-be-dragons reaches of the tarmac, we pulled up next to our plane. Then...nothing happened. No information; no action.

Another ten minutes or so after that, the pilot came onto the bus to tell us that there were technical problems, and that he would come back to us again in ten minutes to inform us whether or not the plane would be flying. Déjà entendu. This time, however, the eventual news was negative, and the bus started taking us back to the terminal—or so I thought.

What happened, however, was that we were taken on a thirty-minute tour right around the airport, never knowing what was happening. Eventually, we arrived back at the aircraft. It looked like the same aircraft, but for a tiny difference: the code letters for the first plane were PD; this one was PO.

The second time around, we were able to take off, only an hour later than scheduled. I was certainly impressed with Lufthansa’s ability to magick up a spare aircraft and get it ready to take off in less time than it takes me to get out of bed in the morning. The only real bad point: we went so fast that there was no time for the in-flight snack, and I was hungry!

Oh, by the way: my luggage arrived safely too.