• 5:52 PM
  Goto NARITA

The first day of our trip is the literal "take a trip" part. We travel airports from Seattle-Tacoma to Narita. This take around 10 hours, but you cross several time zones. In our case, time zones enough to put our GMT offset over the -12:00 mark, at which point you may as well just switch to +12:00 and call it tomorrow. This transition happens at the "International Date Line", an invisible line over the Pacific Ocean opposite the GMT time zone, where the positive and negative zone offsets meet. One interesting property of crossing this line is that you can easily move "forward" in time offsets enough to arrive at or before the hours you left, local time (if travelling east). Since we're travelling west, we just get to see an entire day vanish into thin air, leaving at noon on Saturday and arriving Sunday evening.

The flight begins with announcements in Japanese and English, but we seem to lose the English ones somewhere around HST. Maybe I just stop noticing them. We are served chicken or beef? and chicken or pasta? I choose chicken, and the second dish is a strange compromise between chicken katsu and chicken parmesan. It is fried, sliced chicken cutlets over soba-like noodles with what looks like nacho cheese on top. Not too bad, considering.

We are surrounded by babies, one of which manages to cry for hours, tiring out around 1:30 before landing. It is easy to want to blame the baby for crying in this situation, but from what little I can remember about being a baby, there isn't a whole lot else that seems appropriate. Flying was also a miserable experience when I was so tiny. Fortunately the other babies are not set off very often, and mainly interact with me in the form of curious prodding when my elbow appears in the space between my seat and the window.

The movie is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which I watch in Japanese for a while, before discovering that there is another channel with the English version, though both are subtitled in Chinese. Another channel holds some kind of Ben Affleck comedy wherein he is either pretending to be gay or pretending to be pretending to be gay, mainly interesting because of the voice actors they have chosen to record the Japanese dialog. It contains classic voice stylings as "whiny sidekick", "hoarse macho guy", and of course Leonardo from the teenage mutant ninja turtles. Not necessarily matched up with voices on the original English track.

Narita is busy like any other airport, with a curious paucity of food places. We buy beverages from a hot/cold beverage vending machine, after renting a cell phone.

This is the first picture of the whole trip.
Taken on the train from Narita airport to Tokyo. Check out mah braces!

The subway out is pretty full but I nap through most of it. The connecting stations remind me of NYC subways, which are the only other subways I've had a lot of experience with. (Except the T in Boston/Cambridge, I guess. It's not like the T.) There are signs advising people not to talk on their cell phones in the sick + elderly seating section. Everybody has their cell phones out, but no-one is talking. They are holding the phones in front of themselves and typing.

The population is part traveller, part elderly, part trendy teenager. At least, until the stations at Shinjuku and Harajuku, at which point the car becomes stuffed with very stylish kids. We get off at Shibuya, which is also a somewhat trendy area, but we're not quite staying there. We're across a boundary and we're actually in Meguro-ku.

Our contact calls to tell us he can't meet us for plausible train-related reasons, and the owner of the apartment will meet us in front of the frenchoid cafe we had arranged. The cafe is called Vie de France" and is staffed by women dressed in frilly approximations of French maid outfits. On the ride in, I had read about the "Maid Cafes" in Akihabara which cater to the Otaku crowd, where the employees are dressed in Maid outfits and address the customers as "Master". I found this creepy enough to keep me outside even this unrelated cafe.

Helen would probably like me to note here that she has been flying for the past 10 hours and dragging luggage around Japan for another 2. Behind her: the Vie de France cafe. Sorry, I missed the french maidoid person at the counter.

I am frequently seeing "Otaku" translated as "Nerds", but having lived in Hawaii for a while and being exposed to the anime crowd for quite some time, I feel this is unfair to nerds. Otaku are specifically comic book/manga/animated series fans of a large caliber.

We arrive at our apartment, are guided up several tiny streets and across one huge thoroughfare, given hasty directions to a 24 hour store, and guided through a brief tour of the room.

"The neighbors are very old and have experience from WWII, so they hate... no, not hate! They are experienced with foreigners from WWII. So if they ask.. no, not ask. But if they ask, just say you are my friends staying here."

The bedding looks kind of gross, and the room is full of supplies left by former tenants, including a bag of "pizza potato" chips. They're still crunchy - must've been pretty recent. We turn in early, after trying two or three futon configurations.