Flight to Narita

Our flight to Narita was pretty uneventful. The flight ended up taking off about 40 minutes later than it was supposed to. We sat in an emergency exit row so we had about 10 feet of open space between us. I have to say that ANA is far better than any domestic carrier I've flown on. Blankets and pillows for everyone including us "poor" schmucks in coach, friendly and helpful, flight attendants, and tasty eats made the 15-hour journey much more tolerable. I particularly enjoyed the rice cracker snacks (no peanuts or pretzels here) and the noodles, stir-fry pork and rice, and Haagen Daz ice cream. The only odd part of the meal was the random selection of Italian apps - I'm not really sure how mozarella and roasted red peppers fit into this.


Unfortunately, neither one of us slept much. The infant who screamed for about 10 of the 15 hours might have something to do with this. Once we got to Narita we had to take about an hour-long train ride to Tokyo Station to transfer to another train. MADNESS! Tokyo Station was so ridiculously crowded and busy; it felt like we had stepped into a swarm of bees. It took us about 20 minutes to figure out which line we needed to transfer to. I thought the chaos was done, but when we got to Shinjuku Station (near where our hotel is located) we found that we couldn't quite figure out how to get out. Seriously. The station is huge! It's basically an underground shopping mall + train/subway station in one. It didn't help that we were both so exhausted (remember, we had been up since 6am EST Thursday, and it was now Friday around 4:30am EST) and brain dead by this point. A couple was kind enough to ask us if we needed help and guided us to the street and helped us find our hotel.

It was only 8:30pm local time when we finally got to our shoebox-sized hotel room but we opted to dine on an assortment of beef jerky and trail mix that we had brought and crash.