In flight - Blogabond

October 30 Departure Day
Two alarms set for 4:30am woke us. I turned on the coffee maker and made yerba mate for Hamilton, donned the clothes I had set out (amazing how quickly they slip on after all the deciding what exactly to take!). Before 5am we were on the road, predictably empty of cars in the early morning darkness. I was grateful to feel a 7am wakefulness, instead of 4am grogginess. And to have finally dropped into my “travel mode” in which my pre-trip anxiety is replaced with a sense of “here we go” - the adventure is on, I'll deal with whatever happens.
It's also a relief that my carry-on items are all in my daypack and waist belt, plus my much-traveled photojacket, so that walking through security and to the gate in Albany was easy, and I had a comfortable (though major) hike from the gate where we landed in Newark to the far distant gate for the flight to Japan.
During the wait in Newark, drawing 2 moveable chairs over to the electrical outlet in the middle of an empty wall, I set my pack on one, together with wireless mouse on a pad which I improvised from a box of Vermont maple candy. I plugged in the computer and, even though you have to purchase internet connection, I began to describe my trip, an adventure where even mundane details take on the special significance of the voyage.

October 30,10:45pm Vermont time or Oct 31, 11:45am Tokyo time. I started out on the tarmac at Newark reading and highlighting my guidebook, delving into the cultural treasures of Kyoto and Nara which I hadn't found time to explore before leaving, amazed and gratified that my mind was clearer than at home, freed of pre-travel tasks. I watched the film Coco Before Chanel, then part of Fellini's La Docle Vita, and suffered through the violence of Rio de Janiero slums in City of God. Marvelous to have one's own small screen in the seat ahead of me and be able to start, as well as pause, a film at one's convenience.
After Coco, I started to explore games, especially Berlitz language learning... but first I had to figure out how to work the wizard wand to get the selection to learn Japanese. The words for days of the weeks, months, counting, simple phrases that I learned years ago! when I spent an academic year studying at Waseda university in Tokyo... had a forgotten familiarity. Reinforcing the learning were video games of shooting down the numbered spaceship matching the Japanese name for the number, though I never did figure out how to save Rapunzel in her tower from the dragon by getting the hero to jump up to the correct month.
Another welcome surprise was the hot meals. When the first, a dinner, appeared, the woman across the aisle exclaimed, “And we don't have to pay for them?!” to which the flight attendant answered, “You pay for them all right.” Yakuniku with good sticky Japanese rice. Afterwards, great sleepiness overcame me so I inflated my pillow, covered my eyes with my black mask and huddled under my blanket. Good Bennington time for a nap.
The woman next to me and her preteen daughter have had some arguments. She wears a skimpy top and long black fingernails decorated with gold symbols – as far from a geisha as one could imagine. They have kosher meals and I'm curious about how one would keep the Jewish dietary laws in Japan.
I have gotten up almost every hour, a benefit of my choosing an aisle seat, found a space near the emergency exits where I could stretch and do some isometric exercises. Three hours into the flight we are over Hudson Bay, temperature ranges from minus 50 to minus 81 degrees outside. Eight hours later when I am trying again to sleep and the mother taps me to let her get out for the restroom, I feel a burst of annoyance, I've had enough of this flight and the man ahead pushing his chair back and knocking my tray table frays my nerves more – it takes effort to keep calm externally and go with the flow – how would I do in a mine a half mile underground with all these people for 69 days?
Some eleven hours into the flight we are over the sea of Okutsk (according to the video monitor)...but when I raise the blind just enough to look out, I see stark snowy and rock mountains then wilderness like one hardly associates with the huge populations of Asia – perhaps the remote islands north of Hokkaido, Japan?

written by

chertop on October 30, 2010 from Newark, United States

from the travel blog: Japan and South Korea 2010

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