12 hours is a long-ass time to be on a plane. We had bulkhead seats, so leg room wasn’t really a problem (for me at least) but it really started to hurt at abou the 10 hour mark.
Immigration and customs was super easy, although we did unintentionally cut in front of some people in line. Jay and I are both pretty useless when we’re tired, so that’s our excuse.
We took the Friendly Airport Limousine (they were friendly-ish) to our hotel in the Shinagawa area. There are a couple of restaurants in the hotel, which was good considering how out of it we were. It took us at least 20 minutes to decide on a place to eat. Most of the dinner options were more expensive than what we were looking for considering we hadn’t changed clothes or showered in more than 24 hours. We ended up eating Chinese food in what seemed to be a Spanish themed bar. Then we couldn’t resist grabbing a beer at TGIFridays, where we sat in front of a Red Grange poster and drank Suntory Dark beer (much better than the Kirin).
This morning I discovered that miso soup is a surprisingly awesome breakfast food. We scoped out the train station and bought our tickets to Kyoto, using one of the ticket kiosks, which have an English language option. So far getting around and communicating has been relatively easy. Hopefully Kyoto will be similarly easy.
I was going to post a photo of the nice garden at our hotel, but I just realized that I took that photo with the camera, not my phone. So instead, here’s a photo of the Red Grange poster.
