After a long morning of driving and Maglev, I got on my Northwest flight to Tokyo.  By some incredible stroke of luck, the other American in my row and I managed to get probably the only empty seat on the airplane between us.  Jonathan, whoever you are, sorry you missed your plane, but my legs and shoulders thank you.

 

Narita airport’s Terminal 1 is amazingly long, and we arrived at Gate 43.  I noticed as we were on final approach that there was an Otis building situated near the airport.  That seems appropriate, since I think I rode over half a mile of Otis moving sidewalks from the gate to the Immigration area.  Immigration and Customs went pretty smoothly, and soon I was making my way to the Arrivals lobby to change currency and buy a ticket for the Airport Limousine bus.  

 

Thanks to advice from Dave as well as various web sites, I decided to take the bus from the airport, and I’m glad I did.  Even though we got stuck in some crummy traffic once we hit Tokyo, extending the 80-minute scheduled ride to almost 2 hours, I still think it was best not to try to handle the Tokyo subway on 4 hours’ sleep with a long day of travel already accomplished.  The bus dropped me off at the hotel door.

 

There’s nothing that can reinforce for you that China is really not a rich nation more effectively than flying from China right to Japan.  Japan is a rich nation.  The bus ride from the airport on perfectly-maintained roads packed with gleaming Japanese, American and European cars driving under blue skies was really a pretty amazing change from the broken concrete, bicycles and mopeds, and perpetual smog of China.  The Chinese are working hard to build their country, and I’m sure they will, but they do have a ways to go.

 

The hotel room is an interesting contrast to the Tongli Lakeview Hotel.  Where the Tongli is a luxury facility, the Shinagawa Prince New Tower is basically an economy hotel for travelers.  The room is small but comfortable, and would be really perfectly fine if only it had Internet access in the room.  The Orbitz web site said that it did, but they lie.  It turns out that the Shinagawa Prince has four buildings: the Main Tower, the New Tower, the Executive Tower and the Annex.  The Executive Tower has broadband in the rooms, but the others do not.  Given how full the hotels in Tokyo were when I was booking this room, though, I’m sure the Executive was already full.

 

After a nap and some consultation of the hotel directory, I struck out to get some food (which I got at the 24-hour Pizza and Pasta restaurant at the hotel — excellent pasta!) and then to find the Yahoo Internet café.  I was astonished to find that the Yahoo café had a whole row of laptop computers all set up, but did not have the facility for people to use their own computers.  Seems like an awfully dumb move to me.  Instead, the very nice fellow at the café directed me to the lobby of the Annex, where for $5 at the desk you can buy a card that gives you 24 hours of access to the WiFi hotspot in the lobby.  It works really well, but I’d rather be sitting with a hot drink and a snack, neither of which is available there.  I must see if there’s a Starbucks in the neighborhood.

 

Anyway, I got online long enough to check email and get on Skype to my mom and let her know I had arrived safely.  Dang, Skype really does rule.  Then, back to my room to crash for a long night’s sleep.