Nothing But Words

25 Hours in Transit

We made it! We arrived last night at Narita airport (near Tokyo) and then took a train to Zushi, about 3 hours south. We’re staying at Maria’s aunt’s house.

Total door-to-door travel time: 25 hours

Hours slept while traveling: Mike - 0, Maria - 1, Kai - 4

Even with the 13 hour time change, we all slept well last night. Kai was really good on the plane. He actually didn’t watch many DVDs - he just played endlessly. He spent about half an hour pretending to stamp our passports, an hour with his toy cars, half an hour pretending he was flying the plane, etc, etc. He was only difficult a couple of times: the little bugger bit me when we were changing planes in Chicago (he’s never done that before - I guess he was really wound up), and he had a mini-meltdown when we arrived in Narita, which was just due to exhaustion. On the plane I read all of Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them. It was an obviously polemic but hilarious book. The only thing that went wrong was that United forgot to send our stroller from Philly to Chicago. So I had to carry Kai around the airport in Chicago and Narita. But they gave us a loaner and will bring his stroller to us later today.

The rule is that you always have to forget at least one thing when you travel, no matter how well you prepare. I remembered the digital camera, and I remembered the CD to install the software on Maria’s new iBook, and I remembered the recharger for it. But I forgot the cable for connecting it to the computer, which means I can’t download the pictures. Maybe I’ll be able to track one down when we get to Akihabra (”electric town”) next week. So my entries in the meantime will be pictureless [Since returning, I've gone back and added the pictures]

Today is a day for visiting with Maria’s relatives: two of her aunt’s three daughters are here in the house with us (Akiko and Makiko), and Makiko has a baby boy. And one of Maria’s other aunts, known as “Big Auntie” (aka “the Flying Nun”, as she’s a nun who gets around) will be coming to town to see us too. We’re taking it easy today, since we’re still adjusting to the time change. We’ll probably go to Kamakura this afternoon, mainly just to see some shops. Then tomorrow we’re off to Aomori in northern Japan, for Maria’s conference.

The house is new, but it’s built on the property that’s been in Maria’s family for generations (the old house was in disrepair, so they had it kncoked down and replaced). The house is loaded with gadgets. The tub has a control panel, but since it’s all in Japanese, I just kept hitting buttons randomly. Then it started talking to me (in Japanese), at which point I gave up and got some help. The toilet seat has an automatic heater, and there’s a armrest on the right hand side with a bank of buttons and blinking lights. While I was brave enough to experiment with the buttons on the tub, I was not quite so brave while sitting on the toilet, so I have no idea why a toilet would have so many buttons. And everything from the lights to the air conditioners have remote controls. At the same time, it’s a fairly traditional Japanese home: many of the rooms have Shoji screens instead of doors, and we slept on tatami mats.

I deserve congratulations for managing to type this entry. I’m using Akiko’s laptop: the keyboard layout is different from a US keyboard, it’s got a Japanese version of Windows, and it took me a while to figure out how to stop it from converting my English characters to Kanji.