Turning Japanese – part 1
Posted by Gypsy on Sep 26, 2010
I’ve now been home from Japan for about 5 weeks, so I figured it was finally time to get around to writing a blog post about my trip. I fully intended on doing this much earlier, but as so often happens life gets in the way. Or I just get lazy. It’s really a mixture of the two.
I was a little nervous about my flight to Japan. I’m generally a nervous flyer, but normally have no issues once the plane reaches 10,000 feet, which is when the flight attendants get up to start preparing beverage service and passengers are allowed to turn on electronics. However, a 14-hour flight that takes place mostly over a vast ocean where there is no place to land in case of emergency is a completely different story. My first flight was leaving around 6 a.m., which meant getting up very early. Luckily, I was flying out of Charleston, which meant I didn’t have to get to the airport until 5 a.m. and I still had time for a little breakfast before my flight. Once I got to Houston I had some time to prepare for my second flight, which would take me into Tokyo. I had already bought a neck pillow to help me sleep on the flight, but had forgotten about getting an eye mask as well. Realizing it would be daylight for the entire flight, I went ahead and grabbed one to match my pillow. After grabbing a second breakfast, calling my mom, and picking up a little bit of reading material, it was finally time to board the plane.
As a side note, I’ve always made it clear that I’m not a fan of the legacy carriers. I just tend to have far better experiences on Jet Blue and Air Tran than I’ve ever had on Delta and Continental. However, when it comes to international service, Continental really brings their A game. The seats are nice and roomy, wrapped pillows and blankets are provided, and the in-seat entertainment was top-notch. Even the food was pretty good. Beyond that, I was pretty impressed by the size of the plane as it was the biggest I could ever remember flying in. Snagging a nice aisle seat in the middle group of three, I got comfortable and settled in for 14 hours of total free time. As I rarely sleep on planes, I only got about 2 hours of sleep during the flight. The rest of the time I watched a bunch of movies and started reading The Passage by Justin Cronin.
We landed in Tokyo around 1 p.m., leaving me about five hours to kill before my next flight. The first hour was spent finding my bag, going through immigration, traveling to the other terminal, and checking into my third and final flight of the day. By this point I had been traveling for 20 hours and was starting to feel a little rough. However, Tokyo’s Narita airport thinks of everything, including shower rooms that only cost 500 yen (about $7) for 30 minutes. Even on little sleep a shower and clean clothes can make all the difference. The rest of the time before my flight was spent surfing the Internet and relaxing. Though I was a little hungry, I was also ill-prepared to deal with the language barrier in my sleep deprived state and opted to just grab some Pocky and a Coke at the shop in the terminal. After what seemed like eons, time moving slowly because I was finally mere hours away from seeing Andy, we hopped on busses that would take us to our Japan Airlines plane. At this point I was so exhausted I passed out the moment my seat belt was buckled. I awoke once, briefly, to eat an interesting cookie-type thing and a Coke, before quickly passing out again.
For all the excitement I had felt leading up to this trip, as soon as I landed in Naha, the main city on Okinawa, I started getting nervous. It’s the same feeling I had when Andy came home from Iraq because it’s always a little awkward after so much time apart. Luckily my hunger and exhaustion overruled that nervousness and as soon as I grabbed my bag I hugged Andy and hopped in the car for the ride to the hotel. Even though it was 11 p.m. and I’d been traveling for about 30 hours, I needed to eat. Since we had no idea what was open this late, we went downstairs, found a taxi and told the driver we wanted soba, Japanese noodles. The best thing I can compare where we ended up to is a canteen. It was an open place with a bar to sit at and an old woman and her daughter cooking behind it. The taxi driver helped us order, which involved putting money in a machine and hitting a selection, but it’s hard to choose a meal when you can’t read the menu. Out came a ticket, which we gave to the woman, and minutes later we had this delicious meal that completely made my night. After that, I was spent and we walked back to our hotel (only getting lost a little along the way), where I crawled into bed almost immediately to finally get some real sleep and be ready to start the first full day of my trip fresh.
Flickr sets in this post: Japan August 2010.
