Japan Day 1 & 2: Flight & First Glimpse of Tokyo

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Set up our SMr Nube and Hammocks to make sure
that we both knew how they worked and what all
the components were.

The flight over the Pacific was an emotional one. Not bad emotions per say, but they did make the flight a lot longer  then the quoted nine hours. It was like being on a roller coaster. First me were super excited, then anxious - what if Japan didn't live up to our expectations? what if it was horrible? what if...? - then we were tired, it is a nine hour flight after all, then we would get happy - we are really flying to Japan, other people do things like this...not us, right?. Well I think you get the idea, every emotions was coursing through our veins, minus anger.

Man! have flights changed since the first time I flew back in the 1990's as a child....

• Head phones actually look like headphones, not stethoscopes that doctors use to listen to your breathing, minus the metal piece at the end.
• You actually get your own TV that has a bunch of recently released movies, instead of multiple monitors that are attached to the ceiling that play the same movie on all of them. Oh, and the you have right in front of you provides information about the flight, music, games, and shopping too.
• They feed your really good food and unlimited drinks. It also appeared that they gave an allowance of alcohol to those of age.
• There's no longer a pull down shade, you press a little button down below to set what kind of darkness you would like and then before landing it gradually brightens back up to mimic a sun-rise.

We arrived into Narita Airport at a little before 4pm Japan time. We were through customs with no hiccups and on the Narita Express into Tokyo Station. The Express was a little expensive...but we really wanted to get into the city quickly and we were new to the train system.

Or at least that's my excuse, since I was the money manager and the navigator and the translator during the trip - not that I knew very much Japanese, but since I was the one carrying the money and knew where we were going, it was kind of a default . By the time we were into Tokyo station it was a little after 6 and we were headed to Kimi Ryokan in Ikebukuro. After taking a couple moments to get our bearing and figuring out the rail system we were off.

In our Yukatas in our room at Kimi.

Once settled out our Ryokan we were back out on the town to find food. We were hungry. After wandering around for about an hour we went back to the Ryokan and asked for any recommendations for food. They recommended going back to the train station as there are food malls with plenty of options, but after a long flight and being up super early to go through TSA we did not feel like walking all the way back, so we settled for the closest decent looking restaurant.

Our first restaurant in Japan was Chinese... 

That restaurant happened to be a Chinese place named Ma La Gong Fang...alrighty, so we looked at the menu which thankfully was a picture book. And made two selections a celery, peanut stir fry and one that looked like sweet and sour. The server told us "no" and then started talking in Japanese..."uhhh, why not?" was our response. After trying to figure out some English to stick a sentence together that would make some more sense to us, which didn't work out very well, one of the other customers blurted out "chicken heads" to try and help the server and us out a little. "Well alright, we don't really want to eat chicken heads on our first night in Japan" is what was running through our heads.

We then asked for recommendations and ended up with a stir fry rice dish and some other things. Once the third plate arrived we were a little bit more confused by our food and how to eat it as they also provided a bowl of water with it. After tasting it was a sweet potato that had been caramelized in ginger which was still piping hot, so to make it cool enough to eat you had to dunk it into water and then eat, but first you had to pry it off the plate with your chopsticks. It was a decent meal and we even made friends with a couple of the other customers. Our fellow neighbors ordered us a traditional Chinese tea...oh, goodness, it was better then the sweetened chilled tea that you can buy in the US. Sharing the experience with the fellow restaurateurs was nice and even fun. It was a fabulous welcome to the country, even if it was on the basement floor of a Chinese restaurant.