The academic year winds down (huzzah!) as the temperatures and humidity rise (boo!); that miserable charade known as the World Crap has ended with a whimper and now comes the serious business of planning what to do for the summer.

It’s been said that planning your holiday is one of the most stressful things in life, right after various types of deceasement and divorce. Deceasement is most likely not a real word, but you get the picture.

Even more stressful, though, is the plight of the ex-patriot planning a holiday. And more stressful still, the plight of the ex-patriot in Japan planning a holiday. How so? Well, first, you can’t just go down to your local travel agent and book yourself onto a package trip somewhere. Well, you can, but a package trip in Japan ain’t a package trip back home. Here it means being stuck with a group of predominantly middle-aged Japanese on an insanely regimented tour in which everything is provided and done for you. All that is required of you is that you press the camera shutter release at the right moment. Want to break away and do your own thing? Forget it, cos the bus goes at exactly 13.27 and that allotted one and a half hours at the Colosseum is all you’re going to see of Rome, baby.

So that leaves us with fully independent travel, which of course means you’re going to have to pay through the nose. Thank God for the internet: that at least has made finding accomodation a little less painless, but still, the freedom to go where you want, when you want, is going to cost you big time. Then, aside from all the usual hassles of juggling available seats on planes with days off and finding that the city you’ve just booked a flight to has a huge festival just when you’re going meaning that your sleeping options are a tent 10 miles out of town or a $300 bed at the Ritz, you have to deal with the pressure from the folks back home.

Yes, that’s right, the family. While they are free to go wherever they please for their hols, there is this kind of unspoken expectation that you’ll be spending yours visiting them. It’s not that you don’t want to see the folks, it’s just that the place you managed to escape from is the last place you want to spend your vacation in. It just ain’t a holiday.