Konnichi wa, Bitches!!
Tokyo Blog 4/8/2005
It's 8:30 am and I'm at Gate D11 for United Flight 883 to Chicago, where we'll be catching our connecting flight to Tokyo. There is a free wireless network provided by Cingular, but for some reason I don't bother figuring out, it won't give me a DHCP lease, thus, no web surfing. Oh, the indignities. (Update, I figured out what it was later, when I had trouble connecting to the Crowne Metropolitan's free wired network. I had set a location to be 100baseT full duplex and it didn't like it, setting it to auto made it happier.)
I'm actually surprised we're here and through all the stuff this quickly. I was sure that I'd be singled out for the "extra" security procedures, since, as Donna likes to say, I'm the "guilty color."
I'm still kinda nervous that something will prevent us from taking this trip, but so far so good. Despite the server meltdown at TJU that Donna warned them would happen if they didn't do something to fix it, I think we're as ready for this trip as we can be. Donna's sitting next to me, reading The Rough Guide To Tokyo boning up on how not to offend an entire city of people. ;)
I've gotten about 6 hours of sleep the last two nights, I might've gotten more the night before, but they called Donna at 5 am because her deathly ill server flatlined for a bit. She ended up going to work early and I never got back to sleep. Not that I needed a lot of sleep yesterday, as I was basically just killing time at work.
They're going to start boarding in a few minutes, so I'll continue this later.
----
It's now 9:37 pm Saturday Night in Ikebukuro. We touched down in Japan around 2:30pm. The flight was really long, duh, and I did manage to doze off for a bit here and there, but nothing really sustained. There was no power plug on the 747 in coach so, my laptop sat in my bag the entire trip. I thought about breaking out my comic pages to work on them, but that would have been really impractical, as I had an aisle seat, and it was kinda cramped. Next trip, I save up the extra to fly business class at least. Neither of us were really comfortable in those seats, though they did feed us and water us a lot. With no laptop to entertain us, we were stuck with the in-flight entertainment, two good shows from the Discovery Channel about the Swedish Ice Hotel and one about the last Egyptian Warrior Pharoah, whose name escapes me now. We also saw Bridget Jones 2: Electric Boogaloo, the Incredibles, and Ocean's 12. Well, OK, they showed those movies, but I really wasn't paying that close attention to them.
I still can't really believe I'm here. I mean I have the stamped passport and everything is bizarrely different, yet still familiar, but I still find it hard to believe that we could actually afford a trip like this, and yet here we are.
Customs was easy, like everything else Japanese, it was efficient, even though the line was huge for incoming flights. The same line in the States probably would have taken 2 to 3 times the 30 minutes to get through it.
There was a brief scare with our luggage, when we couldn't find it right away. Turns out that they disgorged the luggage from our flight while we were in line, (efficiency again, oh, and I noticed that the guy operating the luggage belt would pause it now and again to let the new luggage coming out come down without hitting any other bags. That and they had a woman whose job was to make sure the luggage was clearly arranged on the conveyor. ) and were holding it at the luggage desk that I've never needed to be at before. (Oh, and to compound things I thought we were still Flight 883, when actually we changed flights at O'Hare earlier and were now Flight 881. Eh, lack of sleep will do that.) They had all three bags on a cart for us, and we thanked them and rolled that to the "Exit" lobby.
From there our next hurdle was getting to the hotel. We had three choices, taxi, shuttle bus or rail. This is where our friend's advice came into play, the taxi would have probably cost us about $300 for the trip, supposedly, and while the rail was infinitely cheaper, it meant lugging our luggage around, and then trying to navigate through the streets of a city we've never been to before. The shuttle bus, ended up costing us $60 for the both of us, and we didn't mind the longer drive, since they'd drop us off at the hotel's doorstep. They loaded and unloaded our luggage for us, and we sat at the back of the shuttle, because we're cool, and just soaked in the scenery.
This is when I finally broke out our digital camera and started to take shots out of the window. The ride to the hotel is also when it really began to sink in that we had just flown half way around the world to a place we've only ever seen on TV. The area around Narita was more rural than suburban, and the development starts to pick up the closer we got to Tokyo.
The pictures tell it better than I could in words about how different, yet similar things are. But, even the pictures can't really convey the awe I felt as we got in Tokyo. The big thing is how crowded everything is, the two lane highway runs right through the city, and there are apartment buildings and regular buildings not far from the highway. And the way the highways are suspended and crisscross each other, is not something I managed to capture in the photos. There was large sections of crisscrossing highway that were over water, supported only by the concrete pillars anchored to the bottom of the river, I guess. By the time we got to downtown Tokyo, the crowd had thinned out quite a bit, but it was kinda like being in downtown Manhattan, people density wise, only everybody was Japanese.
We finally arrived at the hotel around 5:30 ish and as luck would have it Patty was wandering outside, as we pulled up. The Crowne Metropolitan is a pretty upscale hotel, as we discovered, and that meant full service. In the US, if you wanted to handle your own luggage, they'd pretty much let you. Here, they politely insisted. So, several helpful hotel employees directed us to the registration desk, taking all our of luggage, including my laptop bag, and waited while we registered. Once registered the bell captain took us up to our room, and unloaded our luggage for us. Meanwhile, as the staff is herding us along, we were talking with Erica and Patty, doing a bit of catch up, and bit of planning for the night.
Two things to note here, most of the Japanese staff people we encountered had really good English skills, and the ones that didn't had enough sense to point us the direction we wanted to go. I have yet to speak a single word of Japanese, but that may be for the best. Second, tipping is considered an offense here. It's like saying, "I think you suck, so here's some money to help you get better." Which is a bit weird, since I'm generally generous with tips, so I felt a bit awkward just saying "Thank you very much" when people are doing all these things for me.
We reserved a "King Bedded Deluxe Smoking Room" and except for the King bed it's about the same size room as a standard back in the states. But fortunately for me, the Internet Access is complimentary. Apparently if the day is clear enough we should be able to see Mt. Fuji from our window, which would only compliment an already spectacular view.
Donna turned on the TV and there was anime on. Go figure. Specifically, the actual TV broadcast of Gundam Seed Destiny which I've been watching through BT, both the raw and fansubbed versions. Though now I get to see the commercials that get cut out of the downloads. Japanese commercials are wonderfully and fabulously over the top and cheesy. I'm pretty sure that if our commercials were like this, less people would TiVo past them. We also saw most of the premier of Tsubasa Chronicle,which looks to be just OK, but that may have been because I was distracted, by BEING IN FUCKING JAPAN!!
We spent the rest of the evening chilling in Erica and Patty's room, with Sparkle and Gideon, telling stories watching the weirdness that is Japanese TV and making each other laugh with our stories and antics. We did go out and hit the 7-11 equivalent called AM-PM, (ironically, there's an actual 7-11 in the opposite direction) and picked up coffee in a can for me, chilled, unfortunately, to keep me going until this "late" hour, and lots of food stuffs that we weren't really sure what they were, but ended up being tasty. Emi showed up around 9pm to drag Erica away for a special Yuri-Revolution related event, and we retired to our rooms.
It's 11:15 pm right now and I'm pretty much done. Judging by the little time we spent with our friends, here, this trip is going to be an exhausting, fabulous time. I'm off to bed now, more, hopefully, tomorrow.
It's 8:30 am and I'm at Gate D11 for United Flight 883 to Chicago, where we'll be catching our connecting flight to Tokyo. There is a free wireless network provided by Cingular, but for some reason I don't bother figuring out, it won't give me a DHCP lease, thus, no web surfing. Oh, the indignities. (Update, I figured out what it was later, when I had trouble connecting to the Crowne Metropolitan's free wired network. I had set a location to be 100baseT full duplex and it didn't like it, setting it to auto made it happier.)
I'm actually surprised we're here and through all the stuff this quickly. I was sure that I'd be singled out for the "extra" security procedures, since, as Donna likes to say, I'm the "guilty color."
I'm still kinda nervous that something will prevent us from taking this trip, but so far so good. Despite the server meltdown at TJU that Donna warned them would happen if they didn't do something to fix it, I think we're as ready for this trip as we can be. Donna's sitting next to me, reading The Rough Guide To Tokyo boning up on how not to offend an entire city of people. ;)
I've gotten about 6 hours of sleep the last two nights, I might've gotten more the night before, but they called Donna at 5 am because her deathly ill server flatlined for a bit. She ended up going to work early and I never got back to sleep. Not that I needed a lot of sleep yesterday, as I was basically just killing time at work.
They're going to start boarding in a few minutes, so I'll continue this later.
----
It's now 9:37 pm Saturday Night in Ikebukuro. We touched down in Japan around 2:30pm. The flight was really long, duh, and I did manage to doze off for a bit here and there, but nothing really sustained. There was no power plug on the 747 in coach so, my laptop sat in my bag the entire trip. I thought about breaking out my comic pages to work on them, but that would have been really impractical, as I had an aisle seat, and it was kinda cramped. Next trip, I save up the extra to fly business class at least. Neither of us were really comfortable in those seats, though they did feed us and water us a lot. With no laptop to entertain us, we were stuck with the in-flight entertainment, two good shows from the Discovery Channel about the Swedish Ice Hotel and one about the last Egyptian Warrior Pharoah, whose name escapes me now. We also saw Bridget Jones 2: Electric Boogaloo, the Incredibles, and Ocean's 12. Well, OK, they showed those movies, but I really wasn't paying that close attention to them.
I still can't really believe I'm here. I mean I have the stamped passport and everything is bizarrely different, yet still familiar, but I still find it hard to believe that we could actually afford a trip like this, and yet here we are.
Customs was easy, like everything else Japanese, it was efficient, even though the line was huge for incoming flights. The same line in the States probably would have taken 2 to 3 times the 30 minutes to get through it.
There was a brief scare with our luggage, when we couldn't find it right away. Turns out that they disgorged the luggage from our flight while we were in line, (efficiency again, oh, and I noticed that the guy operating the luggage belt would pause it now and again to let the new luggage coming out come down without hitting any other bags. That and they had a woman whose job was to make sure the luggage was clearly arranged on the conveyor. ) and were holding it at the luggage desk that I've never needed to be at before. (Oh, and to compound things I thought we were still Flight 883, when actually we changed flights at O'Hare earlier and were now Flight 881. Eh, lack of sleep will do that.) They had all three bags on a cart for us, and we thanked them and rolled that to the "Exit" lobby.
From there our next hurdle was getting to the hotel. We had three choices, taxi, shuttle bus or rail. This is where our friend's advice came into play, the taxi would have probably cost us about $300 for the trip, supposedly, and while the rail was infinitely cheaper, it meant lugging our luggage around, and then trying to navigate through the streets of a city we've never been to before. The shuttle bus, ended up costing us $60 for the both of us, and we didn't mind the longer drive, since they'd drop us off at the hotel's doorstep. They loaded and unloaded our luggage for us, and we sat at the back of the shuttle, because we're cool, and just soaked in the scenery.
This is when I finally broke out our digital camera and started to take shots out of the window. The ride to the hotel is also when it really began to sink in that we had just flown half way around the world to a place we've only ever seen on TV. The area around Narita was more rural than suburban, and the development starts to pick up the closer we got to Tokyo.
The pictures tell it better than I could in words about how different, yet similar things are. But, even the pictures can't really convey the awe I felt as we got in Tokyo. The big thing is how crowded everything is, the two lane highway runs right through the city, and there are apartment buildings and regular buildings not far from the highway. And the way the highways are suspended and crisscross each other, is not something I managed to capture in the photos. There was large sections of crisscrossing highway that were over water, supported only by the concrete pillars anchored to the bottom of the river, I guess. By the time we got to downtown Tokyo, the crowd had thinned out quite a bit, but it was kinda like being in downtown Manhattan, people density wise, only everybody was Japanese.
We finally arrived at the hotel around 5:30 ish and as luck would have it Patty was wandering outside, as we pulled up. The Crowne Metropolitan is a pretty upscale hotel, as we discovered, and that meant full service. In the US, if you wanted to handle your own luggage, they'd pretty much let you. Here, they politely insisted. So, several helpful hotel employees directed us to the registration desk, taking all our of luggage, including my laptop bag, and waited while we registered. Once registered the bell captain took us up to our room, and unloaded our luggage for us. Meanwhile, as the staff is herding us along, we were talking with Erica and Patty, doing a bit of catch up, and bit of planning for the night.
Two things to note here, most of the Japanese staff people we encountered had really good English skills, and the ones that didn't had enough sense to point us the direction we wanted to go. I have yet to speak a single word of Japanese, but that may be for the best. Second, tipping is considered an offense here. It's like saying, "I think you suck, so here's some money to help you get better." Which is a bit weird, since I'm generally generous with tips, so I felt a bit awkward just saying "Thank you very much" when people are doing all these things for me.
We reserved a "King Bedded Deluxe Smoking Room" and except for the King bed it's about the same size room as a standard back in the states. But fortunately for me, the Internet Access is complimentary. Apparently if the day is clear enough we should be able to see Mt. Fuji from our window, which would only compliment an already spectacular view.
Donna turned on the TV and there was anime on. Go figure. Specifically, the actual TV broadcast of Gundam Seed Destiny which I've been watching through BT, both the raw and fansubbed versions. Though now I get to see the commercials that get cut out of the downloads. Japanese commercials are wonderfully and fabulously over the top and cheesy. I'm pretty sure that if our commercials were like this, less people would TiVo past them. We also saw most of the premier of Tsubasa Chronicle,which looks to be just OK, but that may have been because I was distracted, by BEING IN FUCKING JAPAN!!
We spent the rest of the evening chilling in Erica and Patty's room, with Sparkle and Gideon, telling stories watching the weirdness that is Japanese TV and making each other laugh with our stories and antics. We did go out and hit the 7-11 equivalent called AM-PM, (ironically, there's an actual 7-11 in the opposite direction) and picked up coffee in a can for me, chilled, unfortunately, to keep me going until this "late" hour, and lots of food stuffs that we weren't really sure what they were, but ended up being tasty. Emi showed up around 9pm to drag Erica away for a special Yuri-Revolution related event, and we retired to our rooms.
It's 11:15 pm right now and I'm pretty much done. Judging by the little time we spent with our friends, here, this trip is going to be an exhausting, fabulous time. I'm off to bed now, more, hopefully, tomorrow.
posted by Serge at 4/09/2005 08:37:00 AM
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