JAPAN IS AMAZING OMG

In the airport in NYC!

June 1, 2010

4:57pm NC time

I can’t believe I have been on this plane for around FIVE HOURS and we are not even out of Canada yet!! We’re not even over Alaska yet (and let me comment on how cool it is that I actually get to fly over Alaska: it’s really cool.) I thought Europe was a long flight, but that was maybe 8 hours compared to THIRTEEN. I have already gone to sleep and woken up three times, haha.

<----Alaska/Canada

This aircraft (Boeing 777) is enormous. The plane is currently going ~550mph, at ~30,000 ft, and we are 4,000 miles from Tokyo. I’m in the cheapest seats on a middle aisle (it goes window, then two seats, aisle, then five seats, aisle, two more seats, window). I wish I could look out the window, so I’ve been wandering up to Business Class to peek out the tiny window on the emergency exit door where no one is sleeping. But the old flight attendant keeps shooing me back to non-privileged class because I’m not supposed to be up there. (She said I was going to wake up the Business Class with the light from the window, but maybe she was talking about the HOLLERING BABY two feet from me who woke up everyone before I even got there, hahaha. Why there is a baby in Business Class I will never know.) From the two brief glimpses I’ve gotten, it seems like Canada is beautiful! We’re over the Great Slave Lake now. I will certainly make a special trip to the bathroom if we fly over Wasilla, AK.

The plane lunch very closely resembled real food! We even got my favorite kind of sushi: salmon nigiri. It tasted like the Harris Teeter kind but still, that’s impressive for a plane. My mashed potato dish had a bit of an unidentifiable film on it but I ate it. :) There is no recycling on the plane and that makes me Very Disappointed With American Airlines. You’d think a plane would want to reduce the amount of trash they have, because it’s an enclosed space and all.

After eating all of my food, I got two cups of green tea with milk and the flight attendant looked at me like I was a moron for putting milk in them. She said, “Have you ever even had green tea before?” I said yes, despite having never tried it with milk. ;) It was great with milk and sugar! But I probably won’t get it like that in Japan because I don’t want them to stare.

Then I watched some incomprehensible Japanese game shows and listened to J-Pop on the radio. I put the instructions on the screen into Japanese and it was delightful. I’ve been reading the katakana on the maps trying to sound it out, like “guretosurebu…Oh, it’s Great Slave!” and “Howiitohosu…oh, Whitehorse!” It’s pretty fun, like a secret code.

The woman in front of me has been watching a Japanese drama about a Japanese woman whose dream is to open a restaurant. She fell in love with an Indian man and they dreamed of mango lassi and curry as they planned their restaurant together. But then when she finally found a suitable location for the store, she came back to her apartment to show her lover and he had stolen all of her possessions…and her heart! Also she had magic soybean paste and lost her ability to speak after the incident. She had a pet pig too but I thought she was going to cook him. I share this because now my friend Amit will be aware that all Indian men are thieves, and he shouldn’t get his heart stolen by Mo.

EIGHT MORE HOURS TO GO. HOLY MESS, THIS IS A LONG FLIGHT. I’m going back to sleep. :)

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1:10pm Tokyo time, 12:10am NC time

Only 38 minutes until we land in Tokyo!! I have made good friends with the Vietnamese man sitting next to me even though he doesn’t speak English. :) I have drunk 4 or 5 cups of green tea (now without sugar or milk so I’ll be more Japanese), eaten countless little triangles of Gruyere cheese with crackers/bread, and eaten two full meals and a mini-sandwich. AA is super-wasteful with their food service but at least I am well-fed. In this picture I am looking a little rough because I am quite worn out after sitting doing nothing for 12.5 hours. That's my Vietnamese friend!! I don't know his name but we like to talk with our hands and do charades.

The flight seems short now that it’s almost over. I slept for a good 4-5 hours but it doesn’t feel like I’ve been on the plane for THIRTEEN HOURS. I played Tetris and Sudoku on the seatback console and listened to “Te Amo” by Rihanna probably 20 times. The JPop station is awesome but I don’t know the titles of the songs. :( I’m going to play Lady Gaga as we enter Tokyo. :D Not on purpose; that’s just where my iPod Shuffle happens to be.

I seriously can’t wait to land. Immediately we will ship the majority of our luggage to our host families’ apartments because we have a 3-4 day orientation to do first. That’s probably where we’ll go first, but I’m hoping I can at least see some Japanese buildings or culture before then! I am not too tired because I’m used to being up to ridiculous hours of the morning anyway. Next update with be in Japan, I can’t believe it.

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5:22pm Japan time, 4:22am NC Time

 

I am in Japan right now! We are in the OVTA hotel for the next three nights and I have the coolest little room. I would like to extend a thank-you to Amit for making me popular, because I was the first person to figure out the light switches in our hotel rooms! It's the same as you said on your blog in India: put the key into the light switch to make anything electric work. :D We are not in the "main" area of Tokyo I think, but there are neat big buildings here. The streets have schoolgirls and business people on bikes but other than that, the streets are surprisingly empty.

In the airport we had to fill out a lot of forms, change our dollars/traveler's cheques into yen, and go through customs. It was painless except for my failure at Japanese. :)

We had to take a long bus ride to our hotel from the airport, about 50 minutes. We saw rice fields, neat country houses, and a temple from a distance. In my hotel room, I took a shower in their funky showers. It was neat. They call conditioner "rinse" and they provide the world's tiniest toothpaste tubes (about 2cm) and a toothbrush, razor, bathrobe, slippers, and an extremely tiny trashcan to each guest.

The internet is SO FAST HERE, my photos upload even quicker than they do at UNC or in Wilmington. I <3 Japanese technology.

It's about to be dinner time, and we get to meet our partners at Kanda University. My partner's name is Kami!! More later, I have to go scurry around and speak Japanese and eat amazing Japanese food.