Getting There is Half the Fun

It is almost 2 am Tokyo time. I have been attempting to sleep for the last 4 hours and having very little luck. When I drug my sorry self of the plane at Narita airport, I had only managed to cat nap once or twice during the entire flight and I felt that I could have laid down on the baggage carrousel and slept for about 20 hours strait. Now I wish that I had.

My last 27 hours went something like this. Dave gets me to the security cut off point at Dulles airport and stares longingly into my velvet eyes and crushes me to his manly chest and kisses me deeply and pushes me toward security at 10:30 am VA time (we may have been wearing trench coats and hats, I can’t quite remember). I enter the Dulles airport dimensional warp and travel the 122 miles to my gate where I stare at the various perfume stores and saturated fat stands that are the only source of hygiene and sustenance for the poor lost souls who are currently trapped in this travel dystopia. After what I assumed was most of a decade, but was in fact about 2 hours, my plane boarded on time and took off at 1:00 pm VA time on the 17th.

I have to side track here for a moment and tell you about a misconception I had about my flight to Tokyo. I assumed that most of the people on the plane would be Japanese and would be going to Tokyo. I was dead wrong. It turns out that no matter where you want to go in Asia, you will at some point in your trip have to stop at Narita airport. So in a plane that held roughly 300 people, only about 20 of us were actually staying in Japan.

Ok, back to the time line. The flight took 13 and ½ hours , during which we were fed one small meal that came in 5 parts and I watched “Ratatouille” once in English with Chinese subtitles and twice in Japanese also with Chinese subtitles. I slept for about an hour in ten minute increments and spent the rest of my time staring out the window amazed that it never started to get dark (yes, I am an idiot) we landed at Narita at 3:30 pm Japan time on the 18th.

I went through immigration and customs, where they took digital finger prints, mug shot, retinal scan and a DNA sample. I exchanged my dollars for Yen, arranged to ship my suitcases to my Tokyo address and bought a bus ticket to the hotel where Temple was having their meet and greet. All of this took about an hour and the bus ride itself took 2 hours.

So at 6:30 Tokyo time I arrived at the hotel. Sticky, greasy, disgusting and so exhausted that I had forgotten most of my first language, let alone my second one (oh and I hadn’t had a cigarette in about 17 hours). I met Sanshirou Yamanaka san who is in my host family and we proceeded to the Tokyo subway to finish my journey to my new home. Tokyo is awesome, it is just what I expected but right now it is also hot and incredibly humid (rush hour, train, Tokyo, hot, humid you do the math). We made it to the apartment in about an hour and a half, where we met Chiemi Yamanaka San, Sanshirou’s wife (They are both very nice and a lot of fun to hang out with, I am optimistic about our time together) The apartment is very small (normal size for Tokyo) and the air conditioner is not working. So we walked out a couple of blocks and had dinner out. We made it back here at about 9:30 and I got ready for bed. I have been wide awake ever since.

Well hopefully this interlude has worn me out. I am going to take another shot at the futon and post this tomorrow with some pictures of my new digs.

Kisses - Liz