I didn't really experience all of day seventeen. It was mostly day sixteen with an odd half-day thanks to the ol' international dateline. At the end of it, I'd been awake until 9 am my time...a total of 26 hours. It was really confusing, especially since when you pass the 21, 22 hour mark, you tend to get a second wind. This is awkward because crossing the int'l dateline, when you get this second wind, It's 11 o'clock at night. What a bizarre and confusing day.
In two words, this day could be described as "In Transit". I literally took Planes, Trains and Automobiles in order to get where I needed to go, and it took longer than a regular-length day allows.
I left Coquitlam around 8:30 in the morning, all set to take the bus to the SkyTrain station when at the last moment, Kyle (Alex's roommate) offered to give me a lift. He dropped me off at Braid station and left me to my own devices.
The skytrain is actually pretty cool. Think of a subway system that hangs above the city. It's totally driverless, and runs overtop of the highways you'd be driving on otherwise. Pretty cool. Made getting to the airport really straightforward.
Since i'd gotten the unexpected lift, I was able to languish at waterfront station a little bit and eat a sandwich as I sipped some coffee to get me going for what I knew would be a long, long day.
Arrived at YVR. Checked in. Fastest check in of my life. Was sitting in the departure lounge 2 and a half hours before I needed to. I realized then that of all the Canadiana i'd visited and seen in my time here, NOWHERE was it stronger than at the Vancouver Airport.
I don't know how I didn't think of this before! Of course the airport's chock full of Canadian culture! They sell it by the bucketload! It's pushed down the gullet of every foreign national that sets foot on Canadian soil. Welcome to Canada! Made in Canada! Proudly Canadian! Everything screams "Canada", whether it's got anything to do with it or not. I photographed the excesses of Canadiana, and then was lucky enough to speak with Rob, a Vancouver ex-pat who's lived his past six years in Tokyo. He had a lot of good advice for me regarding my Japan trip, and was also really eager to speak on Canada and his relationship with it....it was a very cool, very unique perspective to hear, and he spoke on it very passionately.
So then I had a flight. Now i've been on many international flights, and i'm usually on at least one a year. So I thought I knew the drill - but I had numerous surprises.
One - They gave me two meals...both vegetarian. I usually book through expedia, and I have the veggie option checked, but most airlines don't offer it so it's usually a moot point. Not only was it vegetarian...it was really, really good. Full of protein, not just a vegetable sandwich, I got Chana Masala and Quinoa for one, and Spicy Curry & rice w/ bean salad for the other. Even came with a vegan fudge brownie. Totally amazing.
Two - Beer...is free. I'm used to seeing beer always pay to play. It's usually cash only, and 6 dollars a beer, or something obscene. But no, the flight attendant assured me...on international flights, the bar is free. So I had a couple of beers to help me nap.
Three - The in-flight movie thingy is chock full of awesome Canadian content! I watched a great documentary based on Atwood's book about debt. I'd heard Jian Ghomeshi review it earlier in the year, so I was keen to see it anyway, and I saw a film I missed at TIFF called Jeff, who lives at home (which seemed appropriate) starring Jason Segel, who's always awesome. Both were really good! Jeff, who lives at home was a little odd and off the wall, but I really dug it.
Four - There's a usb power outlet and a regular one, so I actually managed to do some editing on the plane! What a perfect place to edit! You have all the time in the world and nowhere to go...it's totally ideal. You're wearing headphones and staring at a screen in the dark anyway...why not cut some stuff? So I did a little teaser for Day Four! It's posted at the bottom here. Features Brandon in Brandon, Manitoba, and Catherine in Saskatoon.
No pun intended - the time flew by. It was one of the best flights i've ever been on. There was an empty seat next to me, so I had tons of room, didn't have to bother anybody, it rocked.
Then we landed in Japan.
First impression: It's like stepping into an office building in the 1970's. Granted, this is the airport and not a great sample size to judge the country on, but this is a first impression after all. Everything's beige, analog, the technology is old, and it smells like stale cigarettes. I've never been into an office building in the 1970's, but this is how I imagine it. Old-style LED displays were among the more futuristic devices, which flight's baggage was on which baggage belt was determined by fridge magnets stuck to a whiteboard. This was not the hi-tech Japan i'd expected. Technology's only for export here, it seems. One thing was reassuring, everything was pictographical, explained by video, and in Hiragana, Kanji, and English.
(Side note, the Japanese have three alphabets; Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana is the closest to the way our alphabet works, with each character representing a certain mouth-sound, but one character in Kanji can be one sound, one part of a word, a whole word, a whole phrase, or a whole idea. There are over 8000 Kanji characters, many taken from the Chinese alphabet....it's extraordinarily difficult to learn. In Japanese class, I learned some Hiragana, and could probably sound out a lot of words, but I'm completely hopeless when it comes to Kanji. Katakana is basically angular Hiragana, but used only to spell out foreign words, that are not originally Japanese. You know how in English we say "foyer" and "a la carte" and stuff like that? If we were Japanese, those words would be written in Katakana.)
However, this bilingualism was to be expected in the airport...I wasn't sure what to expect beyond it's walls.
The Okinawa flight had something interesting to offer as well. They had a camera on the nose of the plane, and instead of showing in-flight entertainment or what have you on the screens during take-off, they show you what the pilot sees, and you can actually see out the front of the plane as it careens down the runway and into the air, at which point it switches to a camera underneath the plane, so you can see the ground recede below. It's pretty cool.
The odd thing about the Okinawa flight was that it was full of US Marines. I knew that there was an American military base on Okinawa, and that it had been a sore point for Japanese-American relations for some time - so much so that the current Prime Minister of Japan was elected on a platform partially based on removing the American presence on Okinawa. What I didn't know, that I found out later, is that the base is huge...and that there are 19,000 marines that live on base here in Okinawa. There were dozens on the plane, and probably dozens on the next flight too.
Landed in Okinawa, Lindsay's plane was supposed to land 15 minutes after mine. I couldn't find the car rental office (where we'd said we would meet) right away, so I waited for her at the gates. Didn't see her. Checked the other arrival gate...and found nothing. After foot traffic from her flight petered out, I discovered that there was a shuttle waiting to take me to the rental car office. I asked the guy to wait for a moment so that I could collect my friend who was coming with me. Went back into the airport, and spoke to three people before I found someone with enough english to understand my questions, and they said they'd look into whether she'd gotten on the flight. Suddenly, the rental car guy comes jogging into the terminal with an excited look. He'd not spoken a single word to me before, I figured he didn't have much english. He held out his cell phone, which read:
"It is said that a friend is at an office."
I breathed a big sigh of relief and got into the shuttle bus with him to head to the rental car place. I don't know how she'd gotten by me, or how she'd managed to shuttle over to the car rental office, but at least we'd figured it out. It was 11 at night by this time, and almost 9am on my internal clock. We hopped in the car for a quick drive into the city...at which point we realized not only were the google maps directions i'd printed nearly useless, but the GPS in the car was nearly impossible to use, unless you could read Kanji. Thankfully, one of the car rental dudes was kind enough to help us out, and he programmed us with directions so we could be on our way. We stumbled about to find a parking lot near our hostel, took a tiny coffin-sized elevator up to the 6th floor, squeezed down a hallway to the corner room, where I promptly passed out. On a bed that took up easily 50% of the rooms' size.
It was an exhausting day and a half...but i'd landed in Japan, and was slated to go diving immediately upon waking up. No rest for the wicked.
Next update from under the sea!
-Jeff
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