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Travelogue, Day 0
Sunday, January 25 - Day 0: Traveling
I'm scheduled to leave at 9am, which means I have to be at the airport at 7am and leave the house at 6am; two hours later at 11am I'm scheduled to arrive in Detroit, which is a very large airport, and at 1pm after a short layover I get on the plane to Kansai International Airport. I'll land there at 5pm Monday, or so my ticket informs me, after a fourteen-hour flight. If I think about that too long I get a headache, but on the bright side, my total travel time on the return trip is negative one hour!
I decide not to go to sleep the night before, because I'd never get to sleep in enough time to refresh myself before the trip. Neesama stayed up with me -- it wasn't much of a stretch for her and it was a weekend, but was wonderful anyway since we weren't doing much of anything. During the night, I intend to A) use my father's printer to print out an application for an internship, so he can mail it, and B) use my father's printer to print out a list of Harvest Moon birthdays so I can play it on my GBA during the flights.
My father and I drive to the airport, and we're about five minutes from the house when I realize I've done neither of those things. Naturally.
We spend about two hours in the airport, eating breakfast and wandering around and noting that JFK personnel in no way weighed any of my luggage, which is a good thing, because they were VERY overweight. My mother has vowed solemnly that she would be at the airport to see me off, even though she had driven to New Jersey the evening before, which seemed just mildly retarded to me. She didn't make it in time. She had me paged, as a matter of fact, JUST as I was boarding the place, in order to apologize to me in tears that she'd only just gotten in and they wouldn't let her into the ticketed-passengers-only-area aaaaargh. I told her to calm down, I wasn't dying, I was only getting on a plane, and I'll call her when I get into Japan. She didn't say goodbye, so I did, and hung up on her.
(In the ticketed passenger area there was a phone/Internet booth. I happily jumped on it in the five minutes I had before they boarded me, only to find out that the content of the FAQ page for Harvest Moon was blocked. Not any of the pages leading TO it... just the page I needed. GRR. You can't play Harvest Moon if you don't know the birthdays! Everyone will hate you if you miss their birthdays!)
The plane was very tiny, and crowded, and staffed by idiots. The takeoff was delayed fifteen minutes because they regretfully informed us that the water supply was frozen, and while they COULD fly without the water supply, procedure says... So it was another ten minutes after that before they came on the speakers again and informed us that someone had read the gauge wrong and there wasn't actually any water in the tanks at all. Hahaha! I didn't want to trust my life to these people, but I no longer had a choice.
My seatmate was a Japanese girl who kept staring at my carry-ons, because I kept them all in my lap -- my huge overnight bag, my laptop, and my huge winter jacket. It was probably a very uncomfortable flight. I wouldn't know, because I fell asleep immediately and only woke up when we touched down in Detroit for my two hour layover.
The first thing I noticed was that Detroit was very big, and had very nice accommodations for travelers. The second thing I noticed was that they had an Internet café, for which I bless every higher being smiling upon me. I had a quick lunch of not-so-good chicken fingers while I wrote down Harvest Moon birthdays. My mother had me paged again, but I couldn't figure out how to work the courtesy phones, so I spent my last fifteen minutes in Detroit ignoring the public announcements with my name on them.
Then... I spent fourteen hours on a plane going to Japan. The plane was a 747, and it was a very large and very crowded plane full of Japanese people who spoke little or no English. There was an American girl sitting in the row ahead of me; she kept turning around to glare at me for no reason I could tell. I had an aisle seat, and I kept waiting for my seatmates to come, but... They didn't. The plane took off, and they still didn't come.
I had an entire row of three seats all to myself.
So I stretched out, and went to sleep, for the first branch of a fourteen hour flight with never-ending sun.
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