February 15th, 2023
7:10PM. We’re finally sitting on the plane, and we are impatient to take off. A great journey to Japan awaits. For Leelee, it’s sort of like going home, but for me, it’s discovery of uncharted territories. It isn’t just my first trip to Japan, it’s the first time I’m leaving Europe at all.
Going through customs went smoothly, and we left early enough to make sure that we wouldn’t run into any trouble. For now, we are traveling light: we just carried a single suitcase for both of us, which was under 20kg. That’s all we deemed necessary for more than three weeks!
Nearly in sync with a friend of ours in the terminal next to ours, we’re taking off. We first fly over the nightly Parisian area, and the weather is nice enough to see the Eiffel tower from above. Soon enough, the cities become nothing more than a few small distant lights. Despite being in the economy class, there is more than enough legroom, even for tall people like Leelee. We got a direct flight with Japan Airlines, a company that always got a lot of merits for their nice flights. And a nice airline company obviously implies nice food!
The flight was going well so far, even though I didn’t manage to sleep at all. After something like 8 hours of flying, I was slowly getting more and more bored. Closing my eyes to make time fly by faster was getting annoying, and staring at the flight map wasn’t really the definition of fun either. I did have enough time to realize that most of my “long” car trips were usually about that long as well, which may explain why my patience was running thin. I decided to kill some time by listening to music and watching a few episodes of anime, that I downloaded before the flight. After a while, the sun slowly starts to show its face, but the curtains remained closed, so people wouldn’t get too much jet-lag. Peeking outside every now and then, we were able to see a mountain range that was somewhere between Mongolia and China.
February 16th, 2023
Surprisingly, the last few hours of the flight felt much shorter. We were flying over China, and then South Korea. The flight attendants brought a second meal. Was it a breakfast? A lunch? Let’s say it was a brunch and call it a day… Either way, we decided not to take the sandwich, and to only take one meal for both of us, that we would share… And even this way, we could barely finish everything. Not that it wasn’t good, but the previous meal was still not quite fully digested.
After seeing a few big Korean and Japanese cities from above, as well as a nice view of Fuji San greeting us, we finally arrived at Tokyo Haneda Airport. It seemed like we were a bit early. We were very tired, however adrenaline managed to keep us awake! After some stress related to Covid documents not loading correctly, we were finally in Japan!
* it’s the name that’s given to Mount Fuji in Japan. You’d better remember it, we’ll reuse it a few times throughout the trip!
And right off the bat, I had no doubts! I could immediately see that we landed at the right place. Every five meters, up to the customs, there were people giving away pink flyers (that honestly didn’t look all that important) containing some health and Covid information. I told one of them that we were together and that we could just take one for both of us. Boy was I wrong, that was a beginners mistake. They wouldn’t let us through as long as we didn’t both have one in hand… A bit further down the alley, next to the bathroom, I decided to put the paper away in my bag, since I didn’t see anybody giving them away anymore up ahead. Second mistake. About 20 meters further up, someone was checking that we did in fact have a paper, and wanted to see them to let us through. And I think that you wouldn’t be surprised if I told you that this wasn’t even the last check…
After getting our luggage, we headed towards a 7-Eleven ATM, the first of a long series. We’ll explain why later on. To spice things up a little, Leelee would let me lead the way to see if I could find the way to the right subway. Apparently, I found the right line to head to our hotel! Well, to be fair, Google Maps helped me, but you never know. We’re hopping on the subway, heading to Ueno, which is in the center of Tokyo. Our hotel, our next and final destination for the day, is over there.
Standing in the subway that quickly got out the undergrounds, I could quickly look outside to see the urban landscape. It seemed both very exotic and different to what I’m used to, and yet somehow very familiar. That being said, especially since I was so tired, it was very difficult for me to really realize that, three years after my cancelled flight, I was finally in Japan.
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