Departure
0300 hours: BEEP BEEP BEEP
The alarm goes off and within seconds I'm out of bed. Wide awake with excitement I throw the last minute items into my carry on and say good-bye to my room. In the living room, my mom and aunt are talking in the dark; despite all of my inner excitement, it feels like a normal day.
Minutes click by and I decide on eating breakfast now, rather than buying food at the airport later. A bowl of cheerios inspires a joke from my aunt that I will probably end up having an American breakfast in Japan. With that out of the way, its time to say goodbye to the rest of the house... first the cats. Taffy takes my news in her usual elegant and careless way, but Lily ducks at my hand and runs off, which is unusual even though she's a bit of a scaredy cat. Next I go to get my brothers (who said they would come to the airport with me); surprise, surprise, they had a change of heart. The eldest of the two even refused to turn over and see me off :( But the youngest eventually came along. So we set off for Detroit, me, my dad driving and my mom riding shotgun, with my brother asleep in the backseat.
Departure at 03:45, arrival at Detroit Metro at 04:50.
~~~~
0625:
Check-in went fine, and it wasn't a bad first experience at an airport. Now we're all just waiting for our flight to Chicago. I realize, or rather, rethink over my decision to put my host family's gift into my check-in luggage. Their gift was a 4-set of glass dessert bowls from Libbey Glass, made in Toledo. Not the smartest decision on my part, given the possible roughness of luggage handlers.
~~~~
Japan Time 12:30
FREAKING. LONG. FLIGHT. But other than that, not bad :) All Nippon Airways has been very courteous. The food was pretty good, far better than I've heard other airplane food can be. No legit turbulence to be mentioned. SO what did I do on this long flight? Well, instead of drawing, or using my camera, or even playing my DS, which I intended to do, I ended up watching 2+ movies (Tangled, Green Hornet? and scrolled through other movies/videos), and playing TETRIS. Yes, the perfect game for this occasion. Sleeping was impossible. I wasn't dark or quiet enough, nor was I nearly tired enough to get a wink of sleep in. Plus I was in the middle seat, which doesn't have much "spread-out" room =.=;
Only one more hour and we will hit Tokyo turf. 8D Again, I wonder how my host family's gift turned out....
Gah, my nose is dry; hopefully my ears don't hurt on the way down too.
The alarm goes off and within seconds I'm out of bed. Wide awake with excitement I throw the last minute items into my carry on and say good-bye to my room. In the living room, my mom and aunt are talking in the dark; despite all of my inner excitement, it feels like a normal day.
Minutes click by and I decide on eating breakfast now, rather than buying food at the airport later. A bowl of cheerios inspires a joke from my aunt that I will probably end up having an American breakfast in Japan. With that out of the way, its time to say goodbye to the rest of the house... first the cats. Taffy takes my news in her usual elegant and careless way, but Lily ducks at my hand and runs off, which is unusual even though she's a bit of a scaredy cat. Next I go to get my brothers (who said they would come to the airport with me); surprise, surprise, they had a change of heart. The eldest of the two even refused to turn over and see me off :( But the youngest eventually came along. So we set off for Detroit, me, my dad driving and my mom riding shotgun, with my brother asleep in the backseat.
Departure at 03:45, arrival at Detroit Metro at 04:50.
~~~~
0625:
Check-in went fine, and it wasn't a bad first experience at an airport. Now we're all just waiting for our flight to Chicago. I realize, or rather, rethink over my decision to put my host family's gift into my check-in luggage. Their gift was a 4-set of glass dessert bowls from Libbey Glass, made in Toledo. Not the smartest decision on my part, given the possible roughness of luggage handlers.
~~~~
Japan Time 12:30
FREAKING. LONG. FLIGHT. But other than that, not bad :) All Nippon Airways has been very courteous. The food was pretty good, far better than I've heard other airplane food can be. No legit turbulence to be mentioned. SO what did I do on this long flight? Well, instead of drawing, or using my camera, or even playing my DS, which I intended to do, I ended up watching 2+ movies (Tangled, Green Hornet? and scrolled through other movies/videos), and playing TETRIS. Yes, the perfect game for this occasion. Sleeping was impossible. I wasn't dark or quiet enough, nor was I nearly tired enough to get a wink of sleep in. Plus I was in the middle seat, which doesn't have much "spread-out" room =.=;
Only one more hour and we will hit Tokyo turf. 8D Again, I wonder how my host family's gift turned out....
Gah, my nose is dry; hopefully my ears don't hurt on the way down too.
It's always going to
be the little mistakes and embarrasing moments that you remember the most...
After being a dope at the check-in and not holding my fingers down long enough to scan (let's say I couldn't hear my directions very well), I went to the money exchange and the guy said he liked my shirt (Superman! yeah!). Aaannnd then we all realized how disgusting and sweaty we were from our flight TT_TT
Unfortunately, there were two more hours to wait before getting on an hour long train ride to Ikebukuro, where our hotel was. So we wandered around the airport looking for lunch and I found this:
After being a dope at the check-in and not holding my fingers down long enough to scan (let's say I couldn't hear my directions very well), I went to the money exchange and the guy said he liked my shirt (Superman! yeah!). Aaannnd then we all realized how disgusting and sweaty we were from our flight TT_TT
Unfortunately, there were two more hours to wait before getting on an hour long train ride to Ikebukuro, where our hotel was. So we wandered around the airport looking for lunch and I found this:
The train ride was actually quite awesome, and going through the cities felt like something out of a movie. The mountains were like those in Jurassic Park!! foggy and all covered in green goodness :3 Also, we went through Chiba, which is Dr. Hara's hometown.... and Tanaka Kouki's 9_9
It was on this train ride that I met (legitly) Lynnette, who happens to love kpop, Big Bang in particular. Instant friendship, and we became travel buddies~
Finally in Ikebukuro: walking through the station with our massive luggages and general bulkiness was not so much fun. We ended up traversing on the outside of the yellow line, right next to the track drop off (uncomfortable!). People were heading the way opposite of us and made the narrow path even narrower, but we survived and made it to the West Exit's escalators. In Japan, when you ride an escalator, you can stand to one side or walk up the either. Simple. In Tokyo's case you stood to the left side while others passed you on the right. So. I'm prepared to stay to the left, but my luggage is a bit farther to the left than I think it is. It gets stuck on the front of the escalator. Stuck. My legs are still going up this thing; I try to step back but can only get one foot a few steps down as I try to maneuver my bag loose. Before actually doing the spilts, it finally is freed-- no falling over on day one is a good sign. Who cares that I almost ran a girl over with my meer 23''/26'' luggage, I don't even know how she got there.
After all that craziness, we reach our hotel. All 6 girls are bunked in one room, and we all need showers. There's 3 showers on our floor so we take turns and redress to go check out the town. Rachel, Bobby, Lynnette and I go out on an adventure. [When we left the hotel someone was being arrested right in front of the lobby! Weird.]
My bunk :)
Now the thing about Ikebukuro is... well, Tokyo in general, is that most of the people are wearing suits. We saw quite a few guys in suits with earpieces [and later realized they were working for host clubs O.o]. In any case, our adventure became a food hunt for pizza (Rachel was craving it haha). We found a KFC instead where we got a little "Japanese" practice in... but really she could have got by just holding up the number on her fingers.
Later, Rachel and Bobby headed back to the hotel; Lynnette and I continued walking around the city and found a delicious looking Yakitori shop just down the street from the hotel. We will definitely go there tomorrow/later. To end the night, we went in search for interesting vending machines. Several of them had Downtown's Matsumoto and Hamada, which I thought was hilarious and awesome. There was also this random guy that just HAD to pee on a wall :P All in all a great day(s).
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