16 May 2010
Day 1: Ahead of Schedule
Posted by Roland under: Travel .
So it was finally time to get my act together and leave SF (and a horrible week) behind and get out to Japan. My worry for the safety of Tom aside, I had to make sure I could get to the airport first. Thankfully, Greg was nice (or bored?) enough to give me a ride to the airport from my new place in the Richmond, which got me to the airport earlier than I expected. Add that with the fact that my gold status on Delta (thanks Deloitte) let me skip the check in and security lines, I was through the security and at the gate with far too much time to spare.
The flight itself was uneventful. I got very little sleep, spending most of the time watching Invictus, a random Japanese movie and breezing through a how to learn Japanese book I borrowed from SFPL before I left (you can never be too safe). Possibly the only interesting thing was that a couple seated next to me spent most of the flight in apparently agony after having drank glass after glass of free wine at the beginning of the flight. I would hate to have a hangover on a tiny plane where you can’t move anywhere.
Oh and also because the flight crew thought the flight was an hour longer than they thought, we didn’t get the second meal we were promised. Airline food, no worries that I missed it.
Previous experience told me that I should hustle off the plane and right to immigration because I didn’t want to get caught in a huge line of passengers trying to get through customs. I got off the plane pretty quickly and got myself through customs in the shortest time ever. I was operating about an hour ahead of schedule, even after I had side excursions to rent my cellphone and get a ticket into Tokyo.
I decided to stay at the same hotel I stayed at last time in Asakusa so everything was pretty much familiar. Nothing much had changed since last year. And the weather was so pleasant that I decided to walk from Asakusa to Akihabara in search of good ramen. I found great tonkotsu ramen, although just like Ramen Jiro last time, the broth, while great, was a bit too much to try and finish all of if I wanted to keep my stomach intact. I walked off the ramen by trying to find a good pachinko place to play for the night. Unfortunately, luck was not with me (I should’ve known, I went to the same place in Asakusa that stole my money last year) and I decided to call it a quick night (as of writing this, I’ve slept for only about 2 hours since I woke up in SF) despite the fact that all of Asakusa was pretty lively with the remnants of a big festival they had earlier in the day.