| Safely arrived in Japan! |
[Aug. 28th, 2007|11:18 am] |
After my usual level of not quite being ready, I am safely in Japan :-)
Stayed up far too late packing (or nearly packing for a lot of the time) and got about an hour's sleep, mostly accidentally ...
... my flight was 13:00, with advice to be there 3 hours before (Virgin said 2.5 hours), so my plan was to tell myself to be there by 10am, so told myself to be ready for 9am ... of course I wasn't ready :-) so I kept packing and panicking! Eventually (just after 10am) I booked a minicab for 10:30 with the thought I'd be ready in time ... at 10:30 I still hadn't changed my clothes into my flight clothes, the minicab had arrived, so I asked him to wait ... at 10:50 I finally had thrown all the extra stuff into a second bag and off we went.
Virgin's rules are any number of bags, but a total of 23kg of checked baggage, and 6kg of carryon. ... I ended up with one bag of 19.5kg, one of about 9kg, and a carryon of 12.6kg ... and as I was in the queue I realised I'd left a plastic bag at home ... at first I thought "oh well, nevermind" then I realised it probably had stuff I wanted, so I phoned my next door neighbour (who has a spare house key, and it was his wedding anniversary and his family were all coming to visit) and he agreed to jump in a minicab and bring it to the airport. What a hero!
While I was waiting for him, I started to check in and they told me that the weight wasn't a problem, except for the carryon, so I had to repack there by the checkin desk ... and John (the neighbour) showed up just after I repacked. It was 12:00 by this point, and as the checkin lady was accepting the luggage, her screen told her the flight had closed ... but she dashed upstairs and got me the last economy seat on the flight ... not a bulkhead seat, but it was an aisle seat, and it was near the window rather than in the centre section.
So a quick dash through security (well, not that quick) and the flight was listed as "closing" so I bought water as I nipped through airside and got to the plane in plenty of time, and found room for all my kit ... including the plastic bag my neighbour had brought ... which turned out to have in it ... my new digital voice recorder, my GPS tracker/logger, my Japanese mobile phone, my JR Rail pass papers and various other important paperwork ... eek!
Flight was smooth, getting diabetic meals meant I got fed first, and for most things Virgin economy legroom was fine, but not for sleeping. I got maybe an hour's sleep.
Arrived fine in Japan (Narita airport), met Martin Easterbrook and Margaret Austin in the passport queue (they had been on the same flight, but probably in a higher level cabin!) ... got some yen out of the ATM and then got the bus to Yokohama International Flight terminal (or something like that!) about 90 minutes drive (sort of like arriving at Gatwick and then getting a bus around the M25, so not a lot of great sightseeing opportunities)
Got a taxi from there to the Intercontinental, left my luggage with the hotel porter and then wandered around for a while and met other fans and Terry Fong didn't show up, so eventually I went and checked into the Manyo bathhouse (about which a lot more later!) ... came back and chatted to fans for a brief time and then went back to do a little unpacking, and about midnight (local time) I went to sleep and slept through to 8am. Got a coffee in the bathhouse cafeteria, did a lot more repacking, installed software on the laptop, transferred all my voice notes to the PC (yay!), and eventually about 11:30 was just leaving the bathhouse (and putting my shoes on) when Pat and Julie phoned me to meet for lunch ... and as I was waiting for them to show up ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) gardenprophet and john_x phoned and we arranged to meet them under the twisty sculpture in Queen's Square (probable photo to follow!) ... we've spent the rest of the day wandering around Yokohama, going to shops, using the underground and we're now back in Pat and Julie's room, eating snacks, having a drink, and chatting (8pm) and we'll be heading out to eat sushi shortly, possibly with other fans.
So that's the quick update, I have a lot more detail in my handwritten notes, my plentiful photos, and my voice notes on the voice recorder (or copied to my laptop) so this may all be fleshed out later!) |
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impressed
bouncy