My Travels

Japan: Day One & Two

May 1st & 2nd
Today was the long trip from Toronto to Japan. The plane left Pearson at 8:30am for Vancouver, so I had to be at the airport at 6am. Even only coming from Burlington that meant I had to be up really early. Still, I was happy to be traveling... I was headed to Japan after all.

The flight from Toronto to Vancouver was nice. It's about 5 hours and I was sitting beside Giselle. The thing that made it nice was that each seat had it's own personal television to watch. There was a monitor with a touch screen in the seat in front of you. You could watch movies, TV shows, listen to XM Radio, or watch the progress of the flight on a map. It seems I loaded up my ipod for nothing... the screen on the airplane was much bigger! Watching movies made the time fly by and before I knew it we were in Vancouver! We all figured we were spoiled and would die if we didn't have the personal TV's on our next flight (almost 11 hours) from Vancouver to Osaka.

Our layover in Vancouver was supposed to be pretty short but there was enough time to catch lunch at the food court. They said that we were going to get food on the next flight... but you never know with airplane food. I ordered Chinese and Giselle tried to teach me to use chop sticks. I figured I'd better learn how in case my home stay family didn't use forks.

When we got to the gate we saw that our plane was delayed so we decided to wander around the area a bit. The guys found an open area in the lounge and started to play frisbee. There was also another two people from UBC playing frisbee in the waiting area. It was kind of fun, although Giselle kept throwing the frisbee into the window... not good.

Eventually the plane boarded and took off... fortunately the seats had the TV's in them again... saved! The flight still seemed really long, but the food was good. Both times they had a beef or chicken option. The first meal I had beef with rice and the second was beef with noodles. Along the way I watched I am Legend, P.S I Love You, Juno, Big Bang Theory, and The Golden Compass. It was nice to see movies I hadn't before. I did manage to get some sleep, though which was definitely needed.

We arrived in Osaka around 4pm local time, which is the equivalent of 3am in Ontario. Since it was still light out we tricked ourselves into believing it was still daytime. We crossed a walkway and checked into our hotel, Hotel Nikko Kansai Airport. It was 3 to a room (two beds and a pullout) and I stayed with Giselle and Angelica.

Once we'd moved in we decided to go for a walk. Along the way we saw a ton of interesting looking cars (and I have the photographic proof). Then we saw an emergency station with fire trucks and ambulance's, so we had to get a picture. A very nice man working there took this picture for us and then showed us the ambulance as well!

We continued to walk until we reached what seemed to be the end of the road. Then we returned to the airport to grab dinner, and headed back to our rooms to get some sleep.

We watched a little Japanese TV before bed. Impossible to understand but I'm pretty sure we were watching the Japanese equivalent of MTV. Leona Lewis was on there singing "Bleeding Love"... half way across the world and they have the same music!

Labels: Japan

posted by Jenn @ 12:06 PM