Day 1: Saturday

It is 7:35am here in Japan and this Sunday is shaping up to be rainy but warm. I slept like a baby last night. The pillows here are like hard memory foam and other than the room being too warm, it was very comfortable. It might also help that I hadn't slept much in the prior 36 hour or so.

Here's a recap of day 1: what I like to call "torture by airplane". I must say I don't know if I'll come to Japan again if I have to fly coach. It was not easy sleeping sitting up for 12 hours, plus the first two 2 hour flights in the US. But here are some of my favorite pictures of the day.
This is the group waiting at the Bangor International Airport. All the check-ins and security went pretty smoothly, with the exception that I forgot to take my laptop out of my carry-on so I had to stand with the TSA gentleman while he examined my bag by hand for 5 or 10 minutes. But he was very nice.

This is probably one of the only pictures of me from day 1. Rachel and I on the first plane. Look how happy we are! Little did we realize...

Here is Tom in the psychedelic conveyor belt tunnel of the Detroit airport. One of our number aptly named it the "Techno Tunnel". Notice Megan in the background is still having a good time. I actually slept most of the first two flights since I stayed up the entire night before. In hindsight that was a bad idea. If we had flown directly from Maine to Japan, it wouldn't have been bad, but all the flight changes made for a lot of disrupted sleep.

This is one of my favorite pictures from day 1. It is just a fountain in the Minneapolis airport in front of people, in front of the window, in front of a plane. We flew a Boeing 747 from Minneapolis to Japan, similar I think to the plane in the background. I should include that during the landing in Minneapolis I got sick because of all the turbulence. I think it was also due to the lack of sleep and hunger, but so many people enjoyed reliving the story upon landing that I am including it here. :)

Skipping ahead since most of us spent the flight sleeping, here is Sarah, Meagan, and Mike showing off their new medical masks and quarantine inspection passes. These were to prove we had passed inspection and could deplane. We sat on the plane for about an hour (maybe less, it seemed to go pretty fast) while they came by collecting health information sheets we had to fill out and scanning everyone with a heat scanner to see if anyone had a fever. Thankfully the whole plane passed. Immigration and customs in Japan was very fast and not at all painful. We landed a little after 5:00pm JST, which is 4:00am in Maine so most everyone was pretty tired, but being the adventurous group that we are, the majority of people decided to go looking for a noodle shop so we could eat some food before going to bed. After walking around for a half hour around 8:00 at night, we ended up right next door to our hotel eating at nice little noodle shop where the waitress was very accomodating. Luckily for us, Jordan (Rick's daughter) spoke some Japanese so they were able to take all 15+ of us.

Here is Keiko getting us all checked in. If there is one word to describe what I've seen of Japan so far (which isn't much), it is "small". By American standards our room is very tiny, barely room to fit our suitcases (I'll post a picture later). After getting back from the noodle shop, it was around 10pm so I decided to go to bed rather than stay up and type. I'll try to add more later today since it is now breakfast time, and I'm starved.

Today we plan to visit the Imperial Palace and Hibiya Park, the Asakusa district, take a ferry ride to Tokyo harbor, and see the Odaiba district. Time to finish getting ready for the day!