After a mostly uneventful trip with only a couple of travel glitches, I finally arrived in Japan! My plan as always was to stay in a hotel close to Narita Airport on landing day, and use the evening to wander the town and try to sync up my sleep schedule.
It worked pretty well, I met up with my buddy John and we went into Narita proper, but being Sunday evening most places to eat were closed, so we ended up at “The Barge Inn”, a pub-style place that caters to foreigners especially flight crews on layover. Got back and had enough consciousness to post a photo to Facebook and passed into the realm of Morpheus.
It’s now 6 AM Monday morning here, 6 PM Sunday where you are, and I’m headed to breakfast and then taking a train to Tokyo to pick up my apartment keys.
Sitting at Reagan National, waiting for the first leg of the trip to begin. Â Got some good sleep last night, given how much adrenalin I’ve been cranking out the past few days, got my breakfast bagel and nearly got splashed by a poor guy whose coffee cup broke on him just as he picked it up. Â Fortunately the splash was limited to the floor and a chair nearby, and he wasn’t splashed. Â Hopefully that’s the worst that will happen this trip!
So, I thought I’d try to be a little artistic with another one of my photos from Japan. I see all kinds of “art” photos where the photographer uses grainy black and white, so I thought I’d do the same with one of my more-or-less “artistic” photos, converting the nice clean crisp color photo to this B&W thing. This is a shot of one of the platforms at Tokyo Station. I was headed to Yokohama for the day, and it was well past rush hour so there was hardly a person there. “Crowded Tokyo” is very selective in its appearance.
I don’t know if this works as “art” or not, since I’m not an artist, but here it is anyway! I guess it kind of looks like an old photo, or something…
Chinatowns in all big cities are pretty much alike, but the one in Yokohama is very colorful at night, just like most of urban Japan, and much more so than the DC Chinatown. Here’s a prime example:
Urgh, I’m now on day 2 of a crappy head cold. It’s a little disheartening to learn the hard way that not all Japanese care enough about the people around them to cover their faces when they have a cold. In walking through crowds to and from stations, or standing on tracks in a crowd waiting for a train, I’ve seen a lot of people wearing the “surgical masks”, to keep from spreading their colds via coughing or sneezing. Unfortunately, some people in the crowds have not been so considerate, and I’ve been standing near people who let loose with a cough or sneeze, leaving their clouds of mucus and viruses for others to walk through. It’s hard to avoid them, too, when you basically have to keep moving behind them, or have to grab the hanging straps that have been grabbed by untold others.
At any rate, it hit me Monday evening, the sneezing, the runny nose, the crappy feeling. Tuesday I stayed in the apartment until the evening, when I decided I needed to get some kind of cold medicine, and some food and something to drink. A quick Google search of the expat sites for advice, a little research with my iPhone dictionary app, and I was ready to head to one of the local drugstores ( 薬屋, kusuri ya, literally “medicine shop” ) for some head cold medicine ( 風邪薬, kazegusuri, cold medicine ). I wanted something specifically for the symptoms I had, sneezing ( ãã—ゃã¿, kushyami ) and runny nose ( 鼻水, hanamizu, literally “nose water” ^_^ ). Fortunately I was able to convey this to the pharmacist, who pointed me to a box of something that had most of the words, and double-checked with him to make sure.
So, fortified with hope, I stopped at a combini to pick up dinner and some juice and soda. Different convenience stores stock different things, but they all have a hot food, cold food, and drinks section, so I picked up a tonkatsu meal, which is a fried pork cutlet, on scrambled egg and rice, and a bottle of Kagome vegetable juice. On the way back I passed a vending machine that carried hot and cold drinks, and so I decided to try a “hot lemonade”. Sure enough, a bottle of lemonade came out of the machine, very warm. I bought two, and they were still warm when I got back to the apartment. I drank the bottles of hot lemonade with the cold pills, and as I was eating the tonkatsu, the medicine started working on my cold. I called it an early night a few hours after that, but had to wake up a few times during the night with more sneezing.
Today, Wednesday, I’m feeling a bit better, the cold is still with me but not as bad, and the cold pills are doing their job. I figure I should be back up and about by tomorrow. Hopefully I just caught the same cold everyone in Tokyo seems to have, so that I have immunity and don’t have to worry about it anymore. We’ll see.
Here’s my magic combination that seems to be working on my cold!
So, almost everything put away that can be put away, one last batch of clothes in the laundry, and the apartment passed muster with the apartment management. Â Boarding passes printed for DCA and DFW, have to pack some things and repack others. Â So, a quick bite while the clothes tumble and then it’s nap time for a couple of hours. Â Ah, who am I kidding, there’s no way I’ll be able to sleep, I’m too hyped up! (which, if you know me, doesn’t appear much different from when I’m calm, but trust me, there’s adrenaline flowing!)
Oh, boy, it’s getting down to the wire, one more (partial) day of work, then I do the final prep work for the trip. Â One last go-around with laundry, packing up the laptop and a hard drive, assorted re-arrangements for the oddments and fripperies that I’ll be taking (cables, batteries, toothbrush, cash, books, etc), and then a short nap. Â The plan is to stay awake from midnight or so until I head to the airport at 4:00 AM. Â Fortunately I’m only about a 10 minute cab ride from Reagan National, and once safely ensconced in my (first class! Â woot!) seat on the plane I can grab an hour or so further nap en route to Dallas.
