Day 1

If I had to sum up the flight in one word:

Cramped.

I'm flying back business class even if it costs thousands upon thousands of dollars. On the upside, the in-flight meals were actually pretty kick ass, which could be my low expectations talking as much as the actual quality. They had a bunch of different movies on in English and Japanese, so I watched the Japanese dub of some boring movie set in old-timey Europe where a Natalie Portman in a green dress was rejecting the advances of some nobleman. They were using the word "heika," which I've been told (by a teacher, not some random dude) is generally reserved for the emperor of Japan, so I'm guessing the king of England. I actually liked the dub all right, which means either Japanese dubs are better than English dubs or I'm a weeaboo.

Oh yeah, but back to why I hated the flight. I just straight-up don't fit in those seats, and the carry-on bag I brought was way too big, so I had to cross my legs at the ankles. This put a bunch of pressure on the bottom ankle, so I had to switch legs every ten minutes or so. For thirteen hours.

I did manage to fall asleep four times, for about an hour each time.

Anyway, so then we got to Narita, through immigration, then went by airport shuttle to the Tokyo City Air Terminal (where we got "Haro-!" from a bunch of girls in school uniforms -- which I'm guessing will be the first of many times). On the way, there were a bunch of signs lining the road that said "shizuka ni," or "be quiet," and had a cartoony picture of a dude in pajamas passed out under the moon and some stars. I thought it was kind of funny that these were all over the highway, but I guess public transportation is a big thing here. I'm also not sure who these signs are for, since this entire nation seems to be stone silent. Anyway, at TCAT we switched to the Hanzoumon line of the Tokyo Metro subway, which goes all the way to Jinbouchou, where our hotel is. We wandered around in the rain looking for our hotel, walking past it twice without noticing. No, the sign wasn't in Japanese. We don't even have that excuse.

We were meeting up at the hotel with a friend of ours who's lived in Japan before and knows his way around better than the rest of us do. He was already there, so we went out to a Yoshinoya, which is this giant chain that serves beef bowl -- which is basically what it sounds like, beef over rice in a bowl. I'm starting to question the conventional wisdom that the cost of living in Japan is astronomically higher than in the US; the smallest size was almost more than I can eat -- and I'm a big dude -- and it was only 380 yen. Apparently they have these places in LA and they're talking about expanding out over the rest of the US. I hope against hope that this is true.

After some sputtering and confusion over Internet access, my malfunctioning laptop and phones, we decided to head to Akihabara, which is like the electronics district of Tokyo. Yeah, yeah, I know. We just kind of wandered around and went to Club Sega in Akihabara -- this was obviously my idea, since I'd heard this was arguably the strongest arcade in the world for Guilty Gear. I don't know if that's true or not, but I'd believe it now. There were two Slayers, a Faust and an ABA all on giant win streaks and I couldn't beat any of them at all. According to some Baiken player on my side of the cabinets (who wasn't winning either, but he was really good) the ABA was probably Fumo. Figures.

We didn't get back home until about midnight, and the computer area was finally open so I e-mailed my family members and crashed.