Welcome to Japan

It would be nice to go on and on, but somehow all my time disappears into necessary activities such as buying internet and phones and bedding and opening a bank account and making friends, so that to write this I must lose precious sleep.

First of all, I'll mention the main points of my travel to Japan. When you're in big city like New York, please be careful and keep your valuables with you, because people will break the passenger window of your car and steal them. Other than that, repacking my stuff was not fun, but thanks to a bag my grandmother gifted me, it was made a little easier. Since we went to the airport at about 9am, hours before my 1:15pm flight, it wasn't crowded and going through Customs and Security wasn't as bad as I expected. As I was emptying my belongings into the bins to be X-rayed, one of the security guards kept telling me more things I needed to put in or things that she'd said but I'd already forgotten. It was kind of like this: "Take off your shoes. Put your laptop in the bin. Take off your jacket. Take off the pouch around your neck. Do you have a belt? Put it on the conveyor. Take off the pouch...." Anyway, having so much time after that, I decided to get a massage and nap, which helped me relax. Before I boarded the plane, I bought water and a panini, but it turns out I shouldn't have bothered with the panini.


Soon after the plane departed on its 14-hr path, the flight attendants, using tongs, handed each passenger a hot wet towel for the passenger to wipe his/her hands with. Then they came by with drinks and a packet of rice crackers.

The crackers were a variety mix, and it seemed that the rounder ones tended to be sweeter, whereas the rectangular or pointy ones were salty or spicy. Of course I preferred the sweet ones. Later we were given the choice to choose our first meal: seafood (shrimp curry) or chicken. I chose seafood, but the flight attendant thought I said "same," which is what the person next to me chose, so I ended up with fatty, mushy chicken with noodles. It was accompanied by gray noodles with wasabi and "noodle sauce," salad and ranch, potato salad, and Haagen Daas vanilla ice cream (!).

Eventually I noticed that everyone around me had disappeared their shoes somewhere and donned slippers. I was sitting next to a Japanese mother with her half-Japanese child, and she explained to me, with a hint of disdain, that the Japanese had probably bought slippers specifically to use on this flight. I learned a lot from her. Most of our talking was near the end of our flight, when we were eating the second meal (some not-very-delicious pasta, salad, strawberry yogurt, and a slice of honeydew melon, one of watermelon, and one of a canned orange). She warned me that although the Japanese government might say so, according to research she had done on the internet, radiation was very much still a problem, even in Tokyo. She strongly cautioned me to avoid Yamazaki-brand bread and eggs, milk, fruit, and vegetables unless they were fed radiation-free feed and raised locally. In addition, she told me that Japanese celebrities, wanting to "help" the Fukushima victims since their livelihoods were ruined, buy and consume contaminated products. One of celebrities' radiation levels became really high as a result. She also said that since Tokyo has high levels of radiation, she won't take her son to Tokyo Disneyland until it's safer. How much of what she said is true I don't know, but because situations involving nuclear facilities tend to be complicated, I'm inclined to believe her.

The airplane itself was rather amazing. Every seat had a TV screen on the back, with a matching control in the armrest. I wasn't able to take a picture, but imagine the armrest as a Wii-remote's case, which you can flip open and pull out the control. The control was a phone on one side, with an accompanying credit card slot, and a TV remote/video game controller on the other. Out of the three modes--audio, video, and interactive--interactive was my favorite. Interactive let you access the other two modes, but it also let you navigate menus to various things. For example, you could change the language from Japanese into English or a multitude of others. There was an option that let you see the plane's progress in terms of time at origin, time at destination, length of flight in hours and miles, number of miles left, estimated amount of time left, altitude, ground speed, and temperature. I was most pleased by the games option. There were a surprising amount of games: Go, Reversi, Battleship, Minesweeper, Bejeweled, a language learning game of poor quality, Chess, Ping Pong, Sudoku, Dynomite, Solitaire, Poker, etc, and that's not even half.

The flight attendants were unusual too. They were all Asian, and they all spoke Japanese along with bits of other languages. Some of them were very good at English, and would switch whenever they spoke to people like me who looked very "only-speaks-English American." They wore business suits consisting of a white collared shirt, a colorful neck scarf, a black shapely pencil skirt, and an even more shapely suit jacket. They all wore their hair in buns. They were very attentive. They walked by often, sometimes offering more drinks, and made sure the cabin stayed stayed clean. When they served food, they took off their jackets and donned pretty aprons.

After my first flight, I had an hour till my next flight to get though Immigration, Customs, pick up my bag, and get to the plane. It was an awful, hellish experience. The line for Immigrations was extremely long--it wasn't until I had already waited 20 minutes that I saw a sign ahead of me saying the wait from that point was 45 minutes. I tried asking one of the employees shepherding people around if I would be able to make my flight in time, but he checked his watch, and while an understanding expression crossed his face he shrugged and said he couldn't help me. My backpack was stuffed full and very heavy, so my shoulders were dying before I made it through Immigration and sprinted down to Baggage Claims. I didn't see my flight number on the sign, so I went first the American Airlines desk to ask about my suitcase, but when I mentioned it was a JAL flight they immediately sent me to the next desk without listening further. I was lucky that JAL was the right desk, because they had my suitcase waiting there. When they realized it was 5:28 and my flight was pretty much leaving right now, they immediately made a call to the plane to wait, and with an employee wearing the same uniform as the flight attendants (Japanese airport uniform for women?), I sprinted with my heavy backpack, purse, and suitcase to another counter, where we picked up some other hapless passenger (non-Japanese), went up an escalator, sprinted the length of the airport, dodging families, rushed through security, and picked up another person (Japanese) as we boarded a bus that took us to the airplane. On the bus, I tried to talk to the Japanese person, but since I was tired from my exercise, I didn't understand all the Japanese he said, and my own was pretty bad. It didn't matter much though, because we quickly arrived at the plane. I lugged my suitcase over to the group of men in suits that looked like firefighter clothes because of the fluorescent tape, and dashed into the plane. Half the seats were taken, but everyone was spread out. IMy assigned seat was next to an elderly couple. The man next to me had a face like he was trying to stay neutral about sitting next to this sweaty foreigner who was making the plane late.

This plane had the same TV and control system, but without the phone. I spent most of the 2-hr flight playing Bejeweled.

My arrival at Kansai International Airport was uneventful in comparison. I followed the signs and the crowd to the Baggage Claim area to get my suitcase, and then tried to find gate H where the MK Skygate Shuttle desk was supposed to be. I found it eventually after crossing a bridge a couple times. Once I got there, I checked in and asked how I could pay since I hadn't had time to get yen in Tokyo. He told me credit card was fine, but I asked where I could get yen anyway so that if I needed to I would have cash already. I was able to exchange $100.00 for 8020 yen (80.2 yen to a dollar) with no problem.

On the shuttle, I tried to watch the scenery, but I was so tired I kept waking up without knowing when I fell asleep. I made it to my hotel safely and paid with my debit card. In the elevator I noticed  that floors 8-14 were non-smoking (I was on 12). In my room, I had difficulty with the lights, since there's a slot you have to put your card to activate them. Once I understood that, I couldn't figure out how to turn them off when I wanted to sleep. The obvious solution, which I realized in the morning, was to turn off the individual lights so that the nightlight could stay on. The solution I used, was to mess with the card till the lights turned off; they didn't turn off when I took out the card, to my surprise. The reason, I realized when I was vacating the room, is that you have to wait a few seconds after you take out the card before the lights turn off. If I'd been more patient, I would have recognized the mechanism sooner.

I've already written a lot, so I'll add some pictures and wrap up for now.

^The previously mentioned card slot.

^In the room on the wall next to the bathroom. Top for the bathroom light, bottom for the fan.

^When I took this, I didn't even realize I was in the picture....

 ^In the bathtub.

^The ceiling of the hotel room.

                                                             

I didn't even post all the pictures from then.