Our voyage to Japan begins! Today marks the first day of my trip to Japan, and our class excursion to a country that’s been on my bucket list for years. I’ve always wanted to visit japan, and now it’s happening! Pavel and I are travel buddies for the trip, and so we arrived at the airport together.
We arrived at JFK in the late morning, and were able to get through check in without issues. Once we sat down in the waiting area, I went to the currency exchange counter that happened to convenientley be right next to our gate, and exchanged some USD for yen. Our airplane arrived, and once we boarded and sat down, we listened to the cabin announcements and then were off!
The flight itself wasn’t actually so bad, 13 hours long but the first half went by relateviely fast. Pavel and I flew in on All Nippon Airways (ANA), and the flight had so many cool features that honestly really suprised me! First off, the seat monitor had an interactive 3D glove that acted as the map for our flight, live TV that included a Japanese channel, a generous amount of preloaded popular movies (both American AND Japanese!), preloaded Japanese tv program episodes, and even two live feeds of cameras mounted to the bottom and side of the plane! Just this aspect alone was getting me more excited about the trip, as the American airline monitors that I’ve had before haven’t come close to this.
We were served two in-flight meals complimentary, which was a pleasant surprise, as I had only expected one. Each meal was reminscent of a Japanese-style meal set, with a small main dish accompanied by a few smaller side dishes, which was really interesting! I had never eaten a meal set like that before, and thought I woudn’t be full afterwards since I was used to bigger dishes at home, but I was indeed full! They followed up each meal with an complimentary drinks like green tea, and offered water or other drinks throughout the flight (which was greatly appreciated!)
I stayed awake for the first 3 hours of the flight, but was only able to sleep for about 2 hours, after which I committed to just staying awake the rest of the time in hopes of syncing up with Japan time. about 7 hours later, and we were touching down in Japan!
We got through cutoms relatively easily, and the Visit Japan website pre-check-in made it so easy to advance through everything. At about 5:30pm Japn time, we were in Haneda Airport’s main lobby. We opted to exchange our JR Rail pass vouchers now as opposed to later on Sunday, as we wanted access to the train lines and that was the only way we knew how at the time. The process, however, took about 2 hours, but after a grueling line wait, we finally had our JR passes and were able to board the Tokyo Monorail to get to Tokyo.
However, one more thing happened before we were able to make it to our hotel; We had to transfer from the monorail to the Yamanote train line to get to our hotel in Shinagawa. Maybe it was the tiredness from the flight or the wait on the line, or the fact that it was now 8:20pm at night, but somehow I managed to get us on the correct train line, but going the wrong direction. I quickly realized this however, and we were able to get off on the next stop and switch platforms to get on the right direction train and arrive at our hotel.
Exhausted, we checked in and got to our hotel room, and opened the curtains to be greeted with a breathtaking view of a nightime Shinagawa skyline. All the trials and tribulations to get here seemed to melt away while taking in this view, and it finally hit us: we were in Japan!
