So it was finally time to get my act together and leave SF (and a horrible week) behind and get out to Japan. My worry for the safety of Tom aside, I had to make sure I could get to the airport first. Thankfully, Greg was nice (or bored?) enough to give me a ride to the airport from my new place in the Richmond, which got me to the airport earlier than I expected. Add that with the fact that my gold status on Delta (thanks Deloitte) let me skip the check in and security lines, I was through the security and at the gate with far too much time to spare.<\/p>\n
The flight itself was uneventful. I got very little sleep, spending most of the time watching Invictus, a random Japanese movie and breezing through a how to learn Japanese book I borrowed from SFPL before I left (you can never be too safe). Possibly the only interesting thing was that a couple seated next to me spent most of the flight in apparently agony after having drank glass after glass of free wine at the beginning of the flight. I would hate to have a hangover on a tiny plane where you can’t move anywhere.<\/p>\n
Oh and also because the flight crew thought the flight was an hour longer than they thought, we didn’t get the second meal we were promised. Airline food, no worries that I missed it.<\/p>\n
Previous experience told me that I should hustle off the plane and right to immigration because I didn’t want to get caught in a huge line of passengers trying to get through customs. I got off the plane pretty quickly and got myself through customs in the shortest time ever. I was operating about an hour ahead of schedule, even after I had side excursions to rent my cellphone and get a ticket into Tokyo.<\/p>\n
I decided to stay at the same hotel I stayed at last time in Asakusa so everything was pretty much familiar. Nothing much had changed since last year. And the weather was so pleasant that I decided to walk from Asakusa to Akihabara in search of good ramen. I found great tonkotsu ramen, although just like Ramen Jiro last time, the broth, while great, was a bit too much to try and finish all of if I wanted to keep my stomach intact. I walked off the ramen by trying to find a good pachinko place to play for the night. Unfortunately, luck was not with me (I should’ve known, I went to the same place in Asakusa that stole my money last year) and I decided to call it a quick night (as of writing this, I’ve slept for only about 2 hours since I woke up in SF) despite the fact that all of Asakusa was pretty lively with the remnants of a big festival they had earlier in the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So it was finally time to get my act together and leave SF (and a horrible week) behind and get out to Japan. My worry for the safety of Tom aside, I had to make sure I could get to the airport first. Thankfully, Greg was nice (or bored?) enough to give me a ride […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[67],"tags":[34],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rolandcarlos.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rolandcarlos.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rolandcarlos.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rolandcarlos.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rolandcarlos.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.rolandcarlos.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":233,"href":"http:\/\/www.rolandcarlos.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rolandcarlos.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rolandcarlos.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rolandcarlos.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}