Woo, almost home. I'm in my swank hotel room at the JAL Tokyu Excel Narita. I've been here since about 3 this afternoon. I left Hakodate at 10 and was in the air for slightly over an hour. It took the remaining time for me to get a bus ticket, ride the 40 or so miles from Haneda to Narita, and then ride the hotel bus from NRT to here. It wasn't much fun, what with 150 or so pounds of luggage to keep up with. The JAL flight turned out to be no problem and it arrived safe and sound after the short flight. The flight was good, too. The plane was nice and clean and there were no fucking babies around me. I had a good seat where I could see the engine and wing. It was a 777 so the engine was HUGE. Just before we took off, I watched the engine suck water up off the pavement as the pilot gunned it before we started moving. I arrived in rain in June, I was rained on throughout July and August and I will be leaving in rain as well.
At Haneda, there was a huge group of what appeared to be bad-tempered and ill-mannered GI's with bitches. They were all waiting to ride the limousine bus to Narita. Fortunately for me, I'd gone to the limousine bus boarding area without buying a ticket. I thought you bought them at the time you got on the bus. When I realised my mistake and bought my ticket, most of them were gone. Whew! Their rucksacks wouldn't all fit on their buses so some of it went in mine. My bus wasn't close to being full.
In my hotel room, there is the usual ass-washer toilet seat, but this one comes with DIRECTIONS and DIAGRAMS! It says what the buttons do and has pictures of how men and women should use the toilet. I was really confused by that, because I thought that by now, all Japanese people knew how to use a Western style toilet, but I guess they want to be prepared. The bathroom seems to consist of one continuous piece of rubbery fiberglas molded into floor, walls, tub, sink, and toilet. I swear, when I first went in, I was temporarily disoriented and thought I was on a ship. Or airplane. However, there's no drain in the floor, so you have to actually shower in the tub (as opposed to the way it's done in most other bathrooms in Japan). Why don't they have a diagram telling you that? There's a warning above the bathtub faucet telling you to keep the door closed because the steam will set off the fire alarm.
I ate nothing all day because it was just too much trouble, pushing my luggage around on a cart and worrying about it. There appears to be nothing around my hotel and it was raining, so I decided to eat in (gulp) the hotel restaurant. I had a 'light meal' (as they put it, since it was 'tea time' and not yet 'dinner time') of beef curry and a coke for the low low price of 1900 yen. I asked the waiter for lots of rice, so consequently, I'm still not hungry and it's 9pm. At some point, I bought a box of Ritz crackers from the hotel store and will eat those. They also have pot noodles in case my crackers aren't enough. Tomorrow, I get free breakfast. I hope it is like the one I had at the Holiday Inn across the road in June. That was yummy.
Right now, there's some yummy cool jazz on the hotel room radio, so I'm listening to that while watching some boring Noh play on NHK. It's better without sound, I think. This jazz is making me homesick because it's making me think about weekends on Peach State Public Radio. Just a little over 24 hours left now.