So Anna and I are off to the other side of the world to spend 10 glorious days in the land of sushi, geishas, hello kitty and weird men obsessed with inflatable dolls. Despite our busy working lives we’ve been preparing hard: we know where we will be sleeping every night (a vast improvement on my previous trips) and we have spent the last month or so practising our Japanese selfie faces. You guys are in for a treat. Our grasp of the Japanese language is limited to “is Takae there please?”, a phrase I learnt in school for when my Japanese friend Takae’s grandmother would pick up the phone, “your daughter should be Miss World”, a phrase I used to suck up to Takae’s dad, Mr Takanori, and of course the typical “arigato” and “sayonara”. If we combined these and our perfected selfie faces I cannot foresee any issues we could have travelling around a completely alien country where no one speaks English and everything is written in a beautiful collection of shapes that meant absolutely nothing to us. Let the adventure begin!