Because I’m a dumb ass, I left my charger for my ibook at home when I was packing. So basically I only got 5 minutes use of it while I was there - the trip in itself however is something that I have to write down, even if it is in retrospect.
Before Tokyo came what turned out to be a very long, and rather uncomfortable flight. Air France of course tried to make it as comfortable as possible with the tiniest pillow known to man, and a blanket that looked like it was made out of goat hair even with these wonderful additions after twelve hours i swear my spine was thinking of dislocating from my ass and running off for therapy.
From the second I got off the plane however, I felt like I was in Japan - it didn’t look like Japan at first, it just looked like any other airport on the outskirts of nowhere. It wasn’t until we got inside and were greeted by a lovely looking air hostess pointing us the way and welcoming us to Japan that the smile really spread across my face. Of course we had to wait inline for immigration for a good half an hour, the que was pretty boiling hot and wasn’t moving at the fastest speed known to man but it was all rather interesting. I kept myself amused by looking at the giant cartoon picture behind the people at the desks, that was a big brown dog with a big badge on his chest displaying the letter ‘C’ - it took me about ten minutes to work out this probably meant ‘customs’ and my suspicions of this were later confirmed by the exact same dog on the ‘what to do at customs instructions’ so yeah, Japan have a friendly customs dog.
Anyhow, at the front of the que they took your photograph, and you pressed your fingers onto this machine and that took your prints, all rather FBI movie feeling.
I got to practice my Japanese a little after that, when booking three tickets for the airport limousine bus, which is completely the best way to get from the airport to your hotel seems as the airport itself is miles away from ‘actual’ Tokyo, or at least what our eyes would consider Tokyo.
The women at the counter were lovely, and marked the fourth time I’d been bowed at since entering the country which made me feel incredibly humbled.
This was the bus we took
Well okay, it looked like a normal everyday bus but the illustration was very cute, and much later on in Harajuku I did see a bus that actually had a face on the front of it, I didn’t get a picture however so I’ll just have to pretend our bus looked like this.
The bus journey was lovely, Emily and Jon fell asleep after about five minutes but I just sat taking photographs from the window and feeling more and more overwhelmed the entire time, and if I’m honest trying not to well up. Needless to say, I was quite happy.
Some of my first views of Tokyo looked like this, they photographs themselves are terrible but I really was to excited to think about arty crap for pretty much the entire trip.
at first the views were obstructed by various walls/fences and such, but they were still spectacular I kept thinking ‘if this is how big these buildings look on this bus way up above this sea on a bridge how big are they going to look when i’m standing in front of them’
My first sight of the many cherry blossom tree’s I’d see on the trip.
Everything I saw pleased me, I still couldn’t believe I was in Tokyo but I had to believe my eyes and everything was beautiful we passed tiny shrines with huge cherry blossom tree’s with huge high rise buildings just next to them and it all looked perfectly right and normal, and merged beautifully. It’s actually difficult to describe in words just what it was like, it was probably the most awe inspiring thing I’ve seen in my life. Like, when you’re tiny and you get taken into a church or cathedral and it all seems so big, and atmespheric and it’s like your eyes are getting bigger and bigger trying to take it all in. It was just like that feeling for the entire bus journey.
And then, we got off the bus and I was stood right next to what seemed the biggest building ever pretty much forcing myself to believe that my feet, and everything attached to them were in Tokyo. Finally.
