The day started at 4am when I woke up to get ready and have
at least that first cup of coffee before getting to the airport. My first flight was to Dallas/Fort Worth at
7:40am. This time I was taking American
Airlines instead of United. Most typically you fly to Peru on American and
Japan on United but I did it backwards this year. The American line was a bit slow even though
it was not that long. The woman at the counter took longer than most of them do
to process me in. Not sure what was going on there. Nonetheless getting checked in and through
security was basically painless and actually fairly quick. I wandered the terminal for a short time
before buying a bottle of water and then waiting it out until flight time while
playing a word search on my phone. The
flight boarded quickly and we took off on time.
There was nothing really exciting to report about the flight. It was 3 ½
hours long and wasn’t really bumpy. We
landed in DFW with me having 2 hours to get to my next boarding time for the
flight to Japan. After exiting I had to take a tram to the correct terminal and
then found the duty free shop to check for a product for Marina that they
unfortunately did not have. When that
was done I found a Mexican restaurant and had 2 beef enchiladas with beans and
rice and a Negra Modelo. The food was a
touch cold but tasty and even a little bit spicy (not spicy to me but spicy
enough to notice they put something in it).
That really didn’t take very long at all so I basically just headed to
the gate to wait out the remainder of the time till boarding.
We boarded on time and it was actually very smooth going
though a bit strange. The first 3 groups
after the premier access basically no one got on the plane. I was group 4 and
that was when the line filled up. I was
in the back row of the first section after business class in the center section
but only 4 of the 5 seats got filled. It actually was a fairly decent seat and
my neighbor was quite and kept to her own seat.
The plane did not take off until around a half an hour late because we
apparently had a leaky water pipe for a coffee pot and they had to fix that
then get the water tank refilled. The plane was a 777 which had in seat entertainment which would be a good thing except it was different from other ones I have seen. First off they were touch screens but they also had controllers on the arm of the chair. This is sort of typical except the controllers were on the top of the arm with nothing to cover them so every time I put my elbow on the arm I kept hitting the volume button which was annoying. Secondly, you could obviously choose your movie but they were set up to run in waves instead of on demand so you either had to join one already started or wait up to 20 minutes for the next one to go. It all worked I guess and the built in time killer of waiting for another movie to start was probably a good thing on as long a flight as it was. All in
all the flight was not bad and they apparently made up a lot of time in the air
so we weren’t really too late. I watched
The Pirates!: Band of Misfits as we were starting up and then I watched the
Avengers cursorily as I was mostly sleeping through it a fair portion of the
way. I ate only the extras on the
dinner tray but not the meal. I managed
to sleep probably about 5-7 hours of the 12+ hour flight. DFW will never be a choice for the way to
Japan again as they still went over Alaska to get there. So that had all the
direction of O’Hare but longer. Not a
good way to go. In any event I also
tried to watch Battleship but I fell asleep on that and really saw less than 10
minutes of it. I really don’t think I was missing anything in that time.
Getting into Japan the line for immigration was enormous and
took about 50 minutes to an hour. The
hall was very hot for this whole wait.
My bag was obviously ready by the time I got through the line then it
was on to customs which was a breeze. I found and fought with a bank machine
for a few minutes until it gave me yen then bought a ticket for the Narita
Express and barely got on it in time. About an hour later I arrived at Tokyo Station
where I switched lines to get to Hamamatsucho and then a short walk to the
hotel where I did get twisted about (first day back, I expected it). I had been
on Facebook with Marina a couple times and she was basically at the hotel when
I arrived so I got checked in and cleaned up as quickly as I could. This included a fast and cold shower because
I was pouring sweat from the heat and humidity. In record pace I was back
downstairs and we walked to an Izakaya named Wataminchi around the corner from
the hotel. For those of you who don’t remember, an Izakaya is a bar that serves
a lot of different types of foods to go along with your drinks. So items are
ordered ala carte and people generally share the foods while they drink. I had
a couple Asahi beers and Marina did all the food ordering. We had some
vegetables and fried chicken along with yakitori and I even had some Tako
(octopus sashimi). For the second round we got some cold soba noodles that were
very good along with some pickled eggplant and fried chicken gizzards. The food
was all really good and it was great to see Marina welcome me right back into
Japan. While we caught up we also made
possible plans for the next couple days. By the time we got out of the
restaurant it was already past 10pm.
From there I had to get back to the room and sort out all
the unpacking that I had just tossed everywhere in my rush to not keep Marina
waiting.
Overall the flights weren’t too bad though it was a very
long day getting in. I really wish I
could have used my new Global Access to get into Japan as well as the US. The
line for immigration was the worst part of the day. I really do not like lines…
The pictures from today can be found here.
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