Touchin' down in Tokyo town!

Konichiwa! Greetings from Japan!

I've made it here safely! I got to my hotel around 11.30 last night after the most adventurous flight I've had to date! Want to know all the details? No??? Well okay then!

Juuuuuuuuust kidding! (*cue Corky Romano voice*)

So my flight out of Burlington arrived to NYC a bit late, which is probably where things began to get interesting. It was just due to some rainy weather, but these stems got a little sprint in once we arrived to La Guardia so I could catch my next flight, to Detroit. In Detroit things were  weird. I kept getting calls on my cellphone from the airline company that the flight was delayed an hour, then I'd get another that it wasn't, and so on and so forth. It ended up being about a two-hour delay due to a problem with the original plane (yeah, I guess I'm fine waiting so the door doesn't blow off the plane while I'm flying over the Pacific... ;-) ). We board and take off! Well, about four hours into the flight I start to see a lot of action about four rows ahead of me. We're talking people huddling around an older gentleman, laying him down across four seats, and then setting up a very MacGyver-esque IV line, hooked to a coat hanger attached to the luggage bin with athletic tape. Hmm. Okay... Not so much. The pilot gets on the intercom and announces we have to make an emergency medical stop in Anchorage, Alaska because they don't want to risk the guy's life by keeping him on the flight. So we start getting ready to land. Have you ever landed unexpectedly somewhere? It's very strange... they have to release fuel from releasers under the wings, so you see what is approximately the equivalent of a fire hydrant spraying liquid fuel while you're flying (my inner environmentalist was sobbing). We landed successfully, and honestly I'm not even upset about the time it took because we got to fly over a ruby-red/ pink sky and see some phenomenal Alaskan mountain ranges. I was blown away and now want to visit Alaska even more!

We ended up getting to the Tokyo-Narita airport about 3.5 hours later than expected, which led to a whole lot of really happy flyers, but oh well. Then I went to luggage claim... no bueno. I knew things weren't good when I saw a piece of luggage that wasn't mine but had a white board screwed onto it with a note written that said something along the lines of, 'Passenger COURTNEY KOZLOWSKI please see an airline representative.' Ruh roh. Well, my luggage wasn't there, and was actually in LAX (I knew it had been hinting that it wanted a West-Coast vaca!), but will be arriving tomorrow. Actually, today, since I'm now typing Sunday morning. Unfortunately it won't get here till about 8pm or midnight, so I have a little voucher to go buy an outfit for my meeting this evening. I won't have all my materials, but at least it's a temporary problem. What's that tag you're supposed to use? #FirstWorldProblems? Onwards and upwards!

I got to my hotel, which is about an hour and a half by bus from the airport. Tokyo is huge and is divided into many districts. I'm in Shinjuku, which is described as the major business/ entertainment/ shopping district- woot! Once I checked in with Dyl and my fam to let them know I was here safely, I headed down for a bite at one of the hotel's restaurants. I had not slept much on the plane with the intention of getting on Japanese time ASAP. There is a 13-hour time difference here, so when I called home around 11.30 pm my time in Japan, it was 10.30 in the morning in Vermont.

The dinner was sooooo yummers! It was basic, and probably just the tip of the iceburg as far as what I will be trying on the trip, but I had udon noodles (thick, white wheat noodles that basically taste like gnocchi turned into fat pasta... like 3 or 4 times the thickness of linquini.) They're available even in the states, but man oh MAN were these ones good!!! They were in some type of mushroomy, beefy broth. On the side came the lightest, most delicately fried Tempura I've had: eggplant, some type of hot pepper that wasn't very hot but instead tasted a little sweet, and prawns/ shrimp that I could probably live on for the rest of my life. Seriously, they just kinda melted in your mouth. Mmmm... =]

Today I'm hanging out with an old friend and former softball teammate, Tamae, who lives just outside of Tokyo. I CANNOT WAIT! I'll report back!
XO- court.