My trip from the US to Japan was a chaotic and anxious time, but was fun nonetheless. The trip started in Sacramento, CA at 5am PST, when I left my house to go to the airport. My flight began boarding around 7am and took off at 7:30am, bound for LAX. I arrived in LAX at 9:00am in the American Airlines terminal and no clue how to get to the international terminal. After asking one of the staff at the terminal how to get to the terminal I boarded a shuttle and arrived within a few minutes. Then I scurried off to Starbucks for breakfast and then metup with Vincent, who would be flying with me, at our gate. The 10hr flight straight over the ocean to Japan took off at 12:45pm on ANA.

This was by far the best airline experience I have ever had. Not only was the staff insanely nice and helpful, but they also offered us water and tea on a regular basis. The flight included 2 free meals that were so delicious. For the first meal, I chose the seafood option, which was a mix of various fish topped with rice. There was a salad on the side, as well as some meat and a piece of bread with butter. For the second meal, I chose the beef pasta option, which was a thick tube pasta topped with really yummy beef sauce. The sides for this one were a mayonnaise pasta salad and some seaweed. For desert we got a Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream. The rest of the flight consisted of either sleeping or playing Tears of the Kingdom. The seats were comfortable and there was a flipable table to eat on. They even gave us a blanket and pillow! Overall 10/10 plane experience.

Upon arriving in Japan we had to get through customs, which was a mess. I have never been out of the US so I didn’t know how customs worked. This caused some confusion when one of the airport staff asked me if I needed immigration documentation, which I took as documents for moving to Japan, so I said I didn’t need them. As it turns out I did. They were just the documents required for entering the country. This meant that I had to leave the line and fill out the docs, then re-enter and get everything checked. After getting through customs, which took longer than it should have, we made our way to the train station. This is were the chaos really ensued. We didn’t know how to get tickets into the train station or for our train, but we eventually figured it out. Unfortunately the train that should have taken us directly into shinagawa stopped for some reason or another, meaning we had to take the train to Tokyo Station and then cab to our hotel. This caused us to arrive at the hotel later than the intended time of 6pm JST, so we had to hurry to the Shinagawa station to get out JR rail pass for the trip.