So after saying all the goodbyes at the airport, I went through U.S. security (which was surprisingly painless) and headed to the Chicago O’Hare airport. In the waiting area I met up with Jesse, Ivan, and Annabelle, the other co-ops coming along on this lovely journey. Haven’t flown in a plane for a while, so I was fascinated with the takeoff and landing. Also took a few pictures around the Chicago airport, most importantly the long movator tunnel with trippy lights. On the flight from O’Hare to Tokyo’s Narita airport we took one of the double decker Boeing 747-400’s (for the airplane-keeners), and I managed to steal an empty seat with extra legroom and no one beside me. The rest of the crew were squished, so my sneaky moves paid off. Overall I dont recommend anyone who is bored to waste 13 hours of their time in an airplane; its not a barrel of joy. The food wasn’t too horrid, and I got to re-watch Little Miss Sunshine - a recommended movie. Upon arrival and reception of my crapload of luggage, we went to ‘the meeting place’ where Akagi-san from the company was to meet us and get us to our appartments. The plane was early so we waited. He never showed up. We called him, and so he says “Glad you all made it to Tokyo, you’re all grown up, do you know how to take the train?”.. and so begins the first adventure in the East.
Every one of us with much over 100lbs of luggage are expected to take some train to some station where we are again ‘to be met up with’ by some guy who none of us can recognize in a crowd. All of the train-ticket purchasing around here is heavily automated. We were able to recognize the station we need to get to on the map, and we knew to take the “JR” train. Apparently this was not enough knowledge. The four gaijin (japanese word for foreigners) with luggage and confused faces were able to flag down an unsuspecting japanese man to help use the ticket dispensing machine. He pointed at a few buttons, as we threw in “JR” and “Tokyo Station” into our attempts of conversing with the poor guy. Some tickets came out. We went to the JR train-line entrance. The tickets were rejected. “Eff.” We were directed to the subway line, for which we apparently bought the tickets. Later we learned that the JR is more like the GO-train, and the subway is.. well, public transit; it required us to switch trains at some station. What was to take 20 minutes took well over an hour, and dragging the luggage sure didn’t help. A coule times we were afraid of leaving something behind, or not-making it in time to exit the doors, or in general.. getting lost.
Once at Tokyo station, we still had to figure out how to meet up with this “Akagi-san” character. Swimming through seas of japanese people in the stereotypical subway station, we had to find a phone to call our friend. A payphone helped. After 3 phonecalls later and about an hour wasted standing and waiting for some unknown japanese guy to find us, we were able to head to his little car to pile all of our luggage in there. During that time I saw some shifty people. There is no ban on drinking in public here, so various men in suits after work (hereafter known as salarymen) were just hanging out in the subway station, drinking, and some sketchy guy was looking over at us for a good 20 min. Anyway, after our luggage was piled into the car, there was no more room for us, so again we were to take the subway to the station closest to our appartments, where Aaron (one of the guys who helped organize all this) was to meet us. This time we didnt have any luggage, and I briefly knew what Aaron looked like from pictures, and various Skype conversations, so the trip was much more easygoing. Speaking of Aaron he’s apparently that DDR legend from Waterloo with the AAA records, to all you crazy AZN’s who care. The rest of the night went smoothly. We were briefly shown around the office (which was mostly empty at 9pm) and taken to our appartments.