Woke up at 4am after approx. 2.5 hours of sleep. Drove to Hartsfield, which was rather scary, then I was left all alone. I arrived 3.5 hours early because that's what they say to do, and had 2 hours to kill after being checked in and through security. Since I had so much time to kill, I walked to concourse E on those moving sidewalks. It was kinda fun. I couldn't be happy, because I didn't want to go. There was a shadow over my mood. On the way to my gate, I stopped at a bookstore and picked up a copy of Foley Is Good, since it wasn't any more expensive than at Borders and continued to my gate. I quickly became bored with sitting at the gate, so I found a Burger King and bought a biscuit. While I was in line, I helped out a friendly old Central American man who was on his way home from a visit to his sons in Kansas. I've no idea why he had a stopover in Atlanta to go to Central America. He didn't speak much English, so I didn't ask.
After boarding, we sat for a really long time moving slowly in a queue of planes bound for the runway. When we finally took off, my stomach got really unhappy. The pilot made a hard bank to the left and I watched the engine and wing flexing and bouncing up and down. I was not happy. There's not much to say about the flight except that it was REALLY boring and REALLY long. I was sitting next to an old Japanese lady who didn't speak English and slept most of the way. There were some assholes near me with an extremely bad tempered baby that cried if it wasn't sleeping. It really, really sucked.
When we got to Narita, it was raining. We flew our last 90 minutes in turbulence. I have never been so happy to be on the ground. My plane was late landing, but my friend was waiting for me when I finally came through the last checkpoint. He lives in Tokyo and went to UGA last year. He helped me out a lot with exchanging money, telephone, food, etc. We walked around Narita town together, but it was cold and rainy and I'd had no sleep for many hours and couldn't read anything, so after a quick bite, we went to my hotel room and I said goodbye to Mohi. I passed out a few minutes later.