Allow me to begin, if I may be so bold, with a note about the design: I'm working on it. Hey, except for the pics at the bottom, this page is hand-coded. If you're looking for cutting-edge design, try barking up a different tree.
-9/21: I would have had to wake up pretty early to make my 6:00 a.m. flight, so I decided to just stay up all night packing instead...which may account for the fact that I arrived in Tokyo with 19 pairs of socks.
"The longest journey...begins with a single step."
Nothing like getting to the airport at 5 a.m. to make you feel perky and full of energy. Oh well, nothing to be done about it - my flight to Vancouver came soon enough. It was a prop plane and I had a window seat right next to the propeller. I slept uneasily all the way to Vancouver, with visions of the airport fight scene from the first Indiana Jones movie filling my head.
I got to Vancouver at 7:40. Great...no need to worry about missing my 1:15 flight. Boy, you don't know cranky until you have to kill five+ hours in good old YVR. Especially if you get there before the various ironically-named souvenir shops are even open. By about 8:05, I had exhausted the entertainment possibilities of an early-morning airport...what to do for the next five hours?
And there it was - proof that my karma must be better than I thought:
I wasted no time in taking advantage of my good fortune:
But I didn't actually get to sleep that long, because flights started arriving and my nice empty airport filled up with (noisy) people. So I walked around, ate some unmemorable airport food, and watched the clock for a few hours.
They finally let us on the plane, where I promptly passed out, waking up only long enough to ask for a beer when they wheeled the beverage cart through, then give it back when I realized they'd tried to pawn off an Asahi Super Dry "brewed in Canada under supervision of Molson" on me. The stewardess seemed kind of miffed when I returned my beer, but hey, that's what happens when you decide to serve your customers a counterfeit Canadian version of an already unpalatable Japanese beer. I hope they'll do a little better on my flight back so I don't have to bring my own
provisions.
When I woke up...I was in Japan.
Some pics from my first week in Tokyo
Here's a view of the city as shot from the window of a friend who lives across the street from Shinjuku Park, one of Tokyo's largest. On the left side of the photo, you can see the park's greenhouse, then as you move towards the right side, you can see the phenomenally unattractive NTT DoCoMo building. It's that tall building that looks kind of like a bargain basement Empire State Building - DoCoMo is Japan's largest cellular carrier, and the top floors of the building are just a big telco hotel. Then at the extreme right, you can see two matching towers; those are Tokyo City Hall.
And though it's hard to tell from these photos, I've actually had a lot of sunny days since I got here...just didn't have my camera with me.
