First Day In Japan

After 19 hours of travel we arrived in Japan.  The first thing before our plane actually landed that was different than in the United States, was the airport in Japan is not surrounded by a fence, it is just in open space (remember those days?). The second thing that was different than back in the States was, to the side of the runway as we were landing there was a bus with tourists standing outside taking photos of the plane!!  The flight was smooth and the landing was too. Our plane arrived at 4:45 PM Tuesday (we had started this journey at 7AM Monday), we were in a bit of a hurry as we were trying to catch the bus to the base; but we still had to go through health quarantine, immigration, pick up our suitcases, get all of our luggage through customs, find the bus somewhere in the parking lot all by 5:30PM (that is when the bus starts loading) and hope that there were still seats open on the bus (it's first come first serve seating).

Narita Airport

During the flight the flight attendants had passed out immigration forms for us to fill out so we felt pretty prepared as we quickly got off of the plane and hurried through the airport.  We breezed through the health quarantine and down to the immigration line. We felt pretty confident as we were some of the first people there and the line quickly filled in behind us, now when I say line I am talking like the kind of line we see at an amusement park which winds back and forth about 10 times. Our hopes were a little dashed as we discover when we got to the front of the line that they had additional forms that now had to be filled out which were not given to us on the plane, so to the back of the line we went to get these additional form (two sided forms for each person).  siiiiiiiiigh.  We were worried because if we missed this bus there was not another one until 8:00 which made an additional stop in downtown Tokyo and we were all feeling a little rummy at this point.  We wound our way back to the front of the line and the Japanese woman at the counter took our paperwork and said to our dumb American ears what sounded like, "fam-er-we" to which we replied, "pardon" and she said what sounded to us like "you fam-a-we".... FINALLY it clicked and excitedly replied, "YES, we are family"! She took copies of the military orders and looked at our passports, stamped them for us and we made our way to find our luggage.  In Japan the luggage carts are free for use so that greatly sped up our retrieving the luggage but what a sight to see four people with carts each piled 2 suitcases high, Americans rushing through the airport in search of which part of the parking lot to find the bus to Yokota Air Base. I have heard so many wonderful things about Japan but the thing I have not ever heard was just how humid it is here. Literally I have not ever felt humidity like Japan, it was 93 degrees and so humid you could see the condensation on your skin which was sticky to the touch.  We found the bus, got tickets and even had a few minutes to spare so we rushed to go use the restroom.

Traffic in Tokyo

The restrooms, toilets in Japan, are definitely more advanced than any toilet I had seen thus far.... come on America, why do we not have heated toilet seats in the States!!  There were no less than 10-12 buttons on the toilet so you know I had to try a couple of them out!  :)  I pushed the button with the picture of the bum and a spray of water, the next thing I knew warm water was gently being sprayed at my bum!! .....Thing it took me a minute to figure out was that you had to push stop to make the spray stop!! I pushed the button for music and the sound of a toilet flushing started, which was a little odd as the toilet was not actually flushing it was just the sound.  Gabby and I were the only two to use the fancy toilets but we loved them.  You might wonder how we could tell which were the girl toilets and the boys toilets, well they are color coded, the girls are pink and the boys are blue.

We had wanted to get some water for the bus ride but as we had been in such a hurry we had not converted any of our dollars into yen and all of the shops and vending machines only took yen.  The bus was not crowded so we had a little room stretch our after the long flight and the air conditioning was heavenly!  The bus ride through downtown Tokyo, with traffic was about 2 1/2 hours.  Everyone but me fell asleep on the bus but I was so struck will all there was to see, and the hopes of trying to get my body on the new time cycle of going to bed and sleeping at the local time.  It was so interesting to see how our vantage of 'living close to the freeway' in the States is completely inaccurate when you see how close to the housing is to the freeway (literally within feet of the freeway) in Japan.  The traffic too draws anything we have ever seen back home.

I didn't snap quickly enough or get some of the taller homes as I was awe struck but you can see how close the homes are to the freeway.  Those are roofs just outside of the window.

More homes right next to the freeway

 

Buildings are very close together

The bus arrived at the base around 8PM and dropped us off at our temporary house.  Our sponsor met us there as he had checked us into the house earlier in the day (Yay!! Thank you!!).  Our sponsor told us that he would be back at 7AM to pick us up for class, that's 3PM back home and we had very little sleep since 7AM yesterday morning.  Turns our that Marc and I had to take 2 days of classes 7:30AM-2:30PM to be processed into the base.  The other thing you logistically don't think about is not having a phone to call your family back home to tell then that you have safely arrived so before we could collapse into bed, we made sure to post a quick message so that our friends and family back  home knew that we made it safely.  Finally bed time in Japan!!