Thursday, June 10, 2010

Made it xD

I never want to fly 12 hours again xD

I was up at the crack of dawn to catch my first flight out of Pittsburgh. My flight to Toronto was in a…very small plane. One one-hour plane ride and a very confusing and unhelpful 6 hour layover and I was on a huge, multi-row, movie screen in the back of the headrest, meal-serving airplane. Between trying to sleep, eating (brownies!), reading an entire Libba Bray novel, staring at maps of the flight and watching How to Train Your Dragon – and restlessness, the last two hours were unbearable – and we were landing in Tokyo. Customs and navigating Narita was easy enough, though I did have to whip out my Japanese direction-inquiring skills a few times and then it was off to the Limousine Bus (somewhat misleading of a name, but much nicer than Port Authority anyday) to get us to the Hotel Pacific Tokyo in Shinagawa.

(too bad I don’t know how to convert raw files off my camera onto this PC, so the pictures over Alaska are lost for now ><;)
My body is so confused. I hadn’t slept in almost 32 hours. And then I felt completely fine to wake up at 4:30 am.
Roommate Heather and I (who’s ironically also from Pitt) decided to bop around Shinagawa station and procured some fantastic raisin bread and apricot tea for dinner before slowly crashing in the hotel room (which has a window seat! And where you can see Tokyo Tower from!) We did some exploring to find some dinner (jet lag led us to raisin bread in the station supermarket-place) and then headed in for the night. The morning led to tv shows about food blogging and a nice buffet breakfast in the hotel. Right in the garden – gorgeous! The flight from Haneda to Hakodate wasn’t long at all.

AND THERE’S A CAMERA ON THE PLANE THAT SHOWS YOU THE OUTSIDE VIEW FOR TAKE OFF! For in front and underneath. So cool.

We found the quaintest and best little bakery, too.

We ran around this afternoon and explored Hakodate now that we’re here and ended up eating amazing grilled syabu syabu (pork, beef, pumpkin and asparagus) Oishii ne! And we made friends with the Japanese businessmen next door. So fantastic. Speaking of fantastic, one of my favorite things was probably the guy on the limo bus to the Tokyo hotel sneezing and telling himself “Bless me!”.
Tomorrow is more placement testing though, boo. Zyaa, oyasumi.

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