10:00 AM MST: Three hours early for our flight. TSA agent asks me if I’m under 12. It used to be 16 so apparently I’m growing younger. I’ve gotta start taking advantage of kiddie discounts… I’m sitting watching the bags while Fletch looks for currency, and a sweet little old Japanese lady approaches me and asks if I’m going to Japan. I stare at her blankly for a minute before realizing, Yes! Oh my goodness I really am going to Japan! This is happening. So she asks if I will wake her up when our flight boards and I say sure. I promised my mom before I left I wouldn’t hold any bags for strangers, and by so doing land myself if Thai prison (because of that Bridget Jones Diary sequel and whatnot). Watching a lady sleep with her bag doesn’t count, does it?
11:30 AM MST: We’ve started hearing boarding announcements for United flight 139 and we all need a red stamp on our boarding passes. The flight attendants keep saying “Please see the agent at the desk” but with those heavy Japanese accents what it sounds like they’re saying is “please see the Asian at the desk.” And of course they’re all Asian. And they just keep repeating it over and over again: “Please see the Asian at the desk.” Also, I’ve learned the Thai word for layered sweet coconut cream pancakes, because there is a word for that, and it is going on my need-to-know vocabulary list.
12:45 AM MST: 2 and a half movies, 7 tv episodes, 4 bottles of sake, and 3 plastic meals later, I’m in Tokyo, wondering why the sun has been at noon o’clock for the past twelve hours. It’s exhausting chasing the sun around the globe. The Dreamliner is an awesome plane. Under typically circumstances. We were flying over Washington when all the in-flight entertainment systems went down, and half an hour later we heard the announcer apologizing for the cabin overheating, and that the only solution they could come up with short of landing at another airport, was to take away our entertainment system. Sweat to death or sit in a flying canister for the next 10 hours with no movies. Luckily that was after we’d already finished Monsters University.
4:00 PM Tokyo Time: Ohhh Japan if only I had more time to eat here. Just the airport sushi is better then our best sushi restaurants back home!
5:32 PM Tokyo Time: I’ve just been informed that the next leg of our journey, the flight from here to Bangkok is seven hours. For some reason I’ve been thinking it was three hours. I think I just never actually looked it up and made the rough estimate that it would be three hours and later on decided that was the number. But no. Seven more hours. I’ve never spent this much time flying before. Filling up on complementary sushi now to avoid the plastic meals later.
2:22 AM Bangkok Time: one four-hour nap, World War Z, and a can of tomato juice later (closest thing planes offer to fresh vegetables), and I’m in Bangkok! Apparently our flight was delayed leaving. I say apparently because the second I sat down I was out. Don’t even remember taking off. We landed in the middle of the night, stumbled off the plane, found a tourist counter, and asked them to point us to a hotel. I’d tell you my first impressions of this magical place but my brain is a puddle of moosh, in desperate need of sleep and unable to translate images into words. Good Night.
