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24/3/10 10:12In my dream I arrived at Narita Airport, and for some reason I was traveling with a group of people I knew, and for some reason they had essentially put me in charge of figuring out where to go and what to do even though Diana was there and she has been to Japan more times than I have. It turned out that the next day was some major holiday, therefore the trains weren't running the next day, and all the trains for that day were booked solid. There was a lot of running around through something that turned out to look a lot more like a suburban mall than Narita Airport, and then I thought to myself, "I know this is a dream, but do I have any reason to believe this wouldn't happen in real life?".
Which I do, because
#1, trains don't shut down for holidays.
#2, there aren't any holidays during the week I'll be there.
#3, I have successfully gotten through Narita by myself before, once merely a month after 9/11 when security was kind of crazy, once when the US immigration people had ripped out my re-entry permit.
So, yeah -- my brain is pretty much All Japan All The Time right now, and I am still terrified of insufficient planning, even though I didn't really get lost the last time I was in Tokyo (I spent long enough blinking and orienting myself at the Shinjuku station that someone asked if I needed help, but I just had to keep turning around until I saw the direction my hotel was in), and even though I have taken plenty of time marking my map with my hotel, the nearest internet cafe, and the nearest large bookstore.
This isn't to say that I haven't had travel disasters, but from those I have learned two very important lessons:
#1, Always have a detailed local map, not the one-page city map in your Lonely Planet Japan.
#2, When you get off the train and put your ticket in the machine, make sure it's the ticket for the trip you just took, not the ticket for your trip the other way.
I think Jill's post on Feministe about her recent Delta flight has made me nervous. I'm flying Delta too, but I've had bad experiences... (actually, at this point I or someone in my family has had awful experiences with nearly every US airline, so it's hard to choose on that basis. They had a cheap nonstop to Tokyo.)
Which I do, because
#1, trains don't shut down for holidays.
#2, there aren't any holidays during the week I'll be there.
#3, I have successfully gotten through Narita by myself before, once merely a month after 9/11 when security was kind of crazy, once when the US immigration people had ripped out my re-entry permit.
So, yeah -- my brain is pretty much All Japan All The Time right now, and I am still terrified of insufficient planning, even though I didn't really get lost the last time I was in Tokyo (I spent long enough blinking and orienting myself at the Shinjuku station that someone asked if I needed help, but I just had to keep turning around until I saw the direction my hotel was in), and even though I have taken plenty of time marking my map with my hotel, the nearest internet cafe, and the nearest large bookstore.
This isn't to say that I haven't had travel disasters, but from those I have learned two very important lessons:
#1, Always have a detailed local map, not the one-page city map in your Lonely Planet Japan.
#2, When you get off the train and put your ticket in the machine, make sure it's the ticket for the trip you just took, not the ticket for your trip the other way.
I think Jill's post on Feministe about her recent Delta flight has made me nervous. I'm flying Delta too, but I've had bad experiences... (actually, at this point I or someone in my family has had awful experiences with nearly every US airline, so it's hard to choose on that basis. They had a cheap nonstop to Tokyo.)