I'm sorry y'all, you're just gonna have to listen to just me (no Jeff commentary) ramble and recount because I am on a solo trip to Tokyo! The price was right, my PTO was approved and my soul was begging to get away from...just everything right now. Mostly being sad and catless and in a country where I don't understand how people can focus on just one issue and use that as an excuse to re-elect a president who is a horrible fascist who doesn't want what's best for anyone but himself. I want to be in a country for a little while where it's peaceful and I don't know the people who made bad decisions on re-electing horrible leaders and where it doesn't feel like everything's going down the drain. Do they have problems here in Japan? Sure! Unless I was super rich and never had to work again, I would never move to live and work here. It's much more fun being blissfully ignorant about the politics and work ethics and animal cruelty and LGBTQ and women's inequality here in Japan and just....BE.
But first I gotta get down off this soap box and hop onto a plane which was the lowest fare I have ever had the pleasure of paying for a round trip to Tokyo! And the airline is JAL? With only one connection? YES PLEASE!
You honestly can't go wrong with either major Japanese airline: ANA and JAL are both excellent in service (well, not so much ANA's English phone line), but JAL is a little bit more pricey and a little more polished. Well, except for the pricing this time! I bought the tickets through American Airlines, and since they're partners with JAL (One World Alliance? Is that it?) I was able to get JAL for the long haul part of the flight both ways!
Are they better than ANA? I think they had better, slightly more spacious seats in economy, but that might be because I lucked out and no one sat in the middle seat and there were no elbow wars. I feel like the food was okay, I remember ANA's being better. What I disliked most about JAL was their headphones and media center. To hear anything you had to use their provided two-prong headphone jack headphones which were pretty shoddy and I couldn't hear things very well. And then I couldn't use subtitles because it had subtitles in a different language because the language was in English? It was weird. I watched Alien Romulus and Moulin Rouge with some sorta SEA-language subtitles.
I did get to try SKY TIME, JAL's official juice which was peach and grape juice mixed. Linner was salmon with rice and veggies, soba, tuna salad (it was all pretty good) and ope, there goes my brain again, connecting this to a Wayside School story (the one where Joy steals one thing from everyone's lunch so that she can have a little of everything and never packs). Anyway, breakfast was mysteriously pizza? And yogurt? Weird. Not good pizza at all.
After a 13-hour flight from Chicago to Haneda Airport in Tokyo, I wasn't doing too shabby. I got an hour or two of sleep on the plane (a Christmas miracle), and was honestly more well-rested and less stressed than I have been since the 2012! (Angie then promptly decided to go to sleep since she was nodding off while sitting up and typing this.)
The next morning....
Anyway, where was I? I'm afraid to look over what I wrote last night in my sleepy state! Not the sleepiest I've ever been on my first night in Japan though, not by a long shot! Jet lag had me awake at 4:30am and I was able to trick my body into sleeping for another two hours though. The crows woke me up and I think I was hearing gongs from the temple that's near my hotel in Ueno Park at 6am.
Where was I, again? Oh yeah, the flight. To give you an idea how quick it all went after landing, I have a time stamp of texting Jeff while we were taxi-ing around and I activated my eSIM (I'm trying Ubigi, and so far so good!) and sent him a text at 4:20pm (Tokyo time). I deplaned, went through customs, declarations, charged up my Suica card and got on the monorail towards my hotel. My next text to Jeff was once I was safely on my way on the monorail at 4:58pm!!! That is only 38 minutes!!! It went so quick!!
I did have to get off the monorail to take the Yamanote line to get to Ueno during rush hour, so that wasn't fun, especially with luggage, but I was able to find a corner to stand in out of the way. I was also able to successfully navigate to my hotel (which I could easily spot on the skyline, so that was nice). Thank you past Angie for doing a pre-run on Google maps!
I got checked in and made it to my room. Unpacked, cooled down, refreshed a bit, and then headed back out for dinner. I doubled checked with the Googles "What is the best meal to have after a long international flight?" and they suggested something light but with protein, like rice or fish. Now, if that isn't a sign to go out and get sushi, I don't know what is!
I had mapped out the nearest Sushiro so I headed to that, which was a nice quick walk into Ameyoko. It was about 6:45pm and the streets were HOPPING! Izakayas were out and everyone was hungry for foods.
And Sushiro as well. I went on a crash course on learning how to wait for a table at Sushiro. You go to one computer and say how many people and counter or table and then you get a number. Then you wait about 25 minutes waiting in a narrow hallway for your number to come up on a screen. Then you take your ticket to a second computer and scan the QR code on there to get your table number and go sit down and order your food on the tablet. They no longer have just random types of sushi going around the belt (not since the Great Gaijin Sushi Rebellion of 2023 (gaijin are why we can't have nice things)). I tried an Otoro (fatty tuna) but since this is a large chain it tasted like just regular tuna nigiri LOL. Same with the wagyu one. I did have some yummy tempura, well, except for one piece which was super weird and I'd never had it before (and will choose not to again, thank you).
No comments:
Post a Comment