We are finally in Osaka! But it was a crazy trip! First of all, we were supposed to leave the house at just 3:55am, to get to the airport just after 4:15am, which is the time that the AA ticket counter opens. Either my stupid watch’s alarm didn’t go off, or I didn’t hear it, but instead of waking at the planned 3am, I woke up at 3:45am. I was instantly in panic mode! Forget the shower! Luckily Mariko had showered a few hours before. I hurridly brushed my teeth, fixed my hair, got dressed and then “ding-dong”, the doorbell rang and Mariko’s friend was here to take us to the airport. I felt so bad because we weren’t ready, and she was right on time. It didn’t take us long to throw the rest of our things in the suitcases (just toothbrushes and stuff) and then get the kids dressed and into the car. I guess we were out the door at about 4:10am, but then we needed to hit the ATM for some cash also! I was in a daze, since it was so early, but my adrenaline was pumping.
We arrived at the airport at about 4:35am, and there was already a longer line than I thought would be there, and then the stupid self-service ticketing machine was giving me problems. Mariko was in line, and she was almost at the front when I finally got the machine to give us the boarding passes. Perfect timing! Also, there is no more checked baggage security check that we have to go thru. I guess it is all taken care of behind the scenes. Next was the trip thru security, which went without a hitch. Whew!!! We had made it to the airport in time! In fact, we had a few minutes to relax before boarding the plane and got some water and coffee. The plane ride up to Chicago was good since Mariko had made a bunch of spam musubi for us to munch on. The kids did really good on the plane as well, with no meltdowns to speak of. But AA no longer has free decks of playing cards, which is so bogus!!!
We arrived at O’Hare and made our way to the connecting flight. On the way, I saw Jesse Jackson. He walked right in front of me. He was wearing a black hat and was about 7 feet tall it seemed. Anyways, we had plenty of time to wait at the airport, since the plane was scheduled to leave at 11:05am, but was delayed until 12noon. I figured that it wouldn’t affect our schedule since the pilot should be able to make up the time in the air, and our stopover in Tokyo was over two hours. But soon we found out that the plane was delayed even longer, now leaving at 2:40pm, which meant we would miss our connection in Narita. I spent several minutes on the phone with the AA agent, but there were no later flights out of Narita to Osaka (Itami), so we would have to spend the night, then catch the flight out of Narita the next evening. That kind of sucked because instead of arriving in Osaka on Saturday night, we would arrive Sunday night so that was one less day for the kids to be with Grandma.
The flight out of O’Hare took off at around 3:30pm. It turns out that our original plane had mechanical problems, then they had to wait for a free plane, which was arriving from London. Also, while we were taxiing on the runway, another plane broke down and we had to wait for that to get out of the way. You know what? O’Hare sucks. I never want to go thru that airport again. Unfortunately we had to go that route because we were using our miles to get three freebies.
But once we were in the air, things went well. The kids were excited because there was a video screen in front of each seat. I was excited because of the free beer. Except that it’s not free anymore. So I just had some tea instead. The kids slept most of the way there, which was a whopping 13 hours. I watched Ratatouille a couple times (what a great movie) and slept a bit. Lunch (which was served at about 6:30pm) was really bad: some meat-like pieces on Uncle Ben’s, plus a piece of salmon sushi. The salad was decent, tho. Oh, another complaint. They ran out of custom forms. How hard would it to be to keep a stack of 300 customs forms on the plane? Jeezus!
Well, we finally arrived at Narita at around 8:15pm and then had to wait around while the AA ticket agents arranged our flight, which we had already arranged via the ticket agent on the phone in Chicago, but had subsequently been changed by the AA people, who wanted us to fly out of Haneda instead of Narita. We told them to switch it back to our original flight, which meant we would spend most of the next day in Narita. As soon as the flight was taken care of, we went thru customs. We were lucky because when we came into the immigration area, one of the immigration officials took us straight to the priority line, bypassing about 40 other passengers. Maybe they just didn’t want our kids, who were getting rowdy, disrupting the area. 🙂
After clearing customs, we gathered our bags, picked up our box dinners and headed for the shuttle bus, which whisked us to the nearby hotel. Another wait to check in, then it was up to the room, which although a non-smoking room, reeked of cigarettes. The boxed dinners were pretty good. Even these simple convenience store meals in Japan blow away the gross economy class airplane food. Our dinners were slices of smoked salmon, deli meats, Japanese style sandwiches, and fried chicken drummettes. It really was quite delicious. We finally hit the sack at around midnight, thinking we would just sleep in the next morning and take a late taxi instead of waking up early to catch the 7am shuttle bus back to the airport. So ended our first day of travel to Japan.
