Okay, I’m settled into my apartment now, got a lot of the things I need to live here for the next 60-ish days, so I thought I’d do a quick walk-around to show where I’m staying. It’s not very long, because it’s not a very big apartment!
So, basically I’m here, in Tokyo, staying at an apartment building owned by Sakura House, which is a company that rents exclusively to foreigners on a monthly basis, which for me here is about $1000 per month at the current exchange rate. It’s pretty centrally located, as you can see by where the Emperor lives in relation!
So, this little video will explain what my apartment in that building looks like. It’s not large but it’s comfortable and affordable, and I can keep all my stuff here.
After landing in Japan, worn out.
So, after getting to Nashville BNA Airport, walking from the airport Hilton at 4 AM, I managed to get on the flight to Dallas/Fort Worth Airport with plenty of time to spare. The BNA->DFW flight was uneventful, I got to DFW on time and got to the gate for the flight to Japan, and that’s when it all went FUBAR.
The plane scheduled to fly us to Narita Airport in Japan was sitting being “maintenanced”, for an unspecified problem (at least they wouldn’t tell us). To top it off, the flight was overbooked, and they kept asking for volunteers who had “flexible flight plans” to get re-booked on a later flight. Who in their right mind is that “flexible” about flying to Japan?
At any rate, they had no ETR for the repair work, and kept posting new estimated departure times, 30 minutes at a time. Once maintenance was finished, they had to hustle us onto the plane so the flight crew could take off without running out of their allotted flying time, we were settled in, the captain announced they had paperwork to complete, but about 10 minutes later announced we had to “deplane”, since they ran out of time.
Once we were back in the terminal, they announced that a new crew was being sought, and that they would fly that plane to Japan, just later than planned. It was supposed to leave DFW at 12:05 PM, but it was almost 5 when they made us play “plane-deplane”. Once they had a crew scheduled they had to get them to the airport, so they scheduled the new departur at 7:45 PM, almost 8 hours later. This meant we’d arrive in Japan at 11:20 PM on Sunday evening.
At the appointed time, we boarded again (with some trepidation) but we ended up staying on the plane, until it took off sometime after 8 PM Saturday night. The flight itself was uneventful, and we landed at the scheduled time. It took only a few minutes to get through Immigration and Customs, I had to show the paperwork for my 2 month supply of prescription meds, and then I managed to catch the last train from the airport, headed into Narita town and my hotel.
If it works, this video I shot in the hotel room, just after midnight, just before I crashed. I recovered and went into Tokyo later Monday morning and picked up the key to my apartment, but that’s for a later post.
Countdown continues, less than 48 hours till takeoff
It’s coming down to the wire, just about everything I can prepare for is done, now it’s just the nerves. I always get anxious about traveling like this, because so many things are out of my control, like airplane delays and weather. So far all looks good, but that doesn’t get rid of the nagging worry. It probably won’t really go away until halfway across the Pacific! 😆
Stay tuned!
One week to go, Japan is in sight…
Well, in 8 days I’ll be boarding my flight to Japan. This will be my longest solo venture since I drove across a big chunk of the US back in 2003 (you can see my blog entries from back then in Nerdtour 2003, if I did the pages right).
I’m a little anxious about it, as usual, but also I’m looking forward to it, I’ll be checking a lot of things off my bucket list, at least the international one. I have a lot of things left to see in the US, which I’ll start on once I get back. Well, after resting up and letting my bank account cool off for a while!