Whenever I return from Japan, I always feel like a time traveller. Part of this has to do with how hi-tech everything in Japan feels, and the other part has to do with how crossing over the international date line lets you arrive in America before you leave Japan which results in you repeating a day (for those of you who despise Mondays, this Monday for me will be approximately 40 hours long).
The flight back was relatively uneventful -- the plane was very empty, so while the boarding agent hassled me about bringing as much carry-on luggage as I did, they let me board with more items than I should have been allowed to (I ended up checking in one of the four bags I attempted to carry-on, partially out of guilt of bringing so much stuff, and partially because I was tired of dragging four bags everywhere). The result of this late check in was that this bag was the very first bag to pop out of the conveyor belt in the luggage carousel. This makes me wonder if the next time what I ought to do is check baggage in at the gate rather than the counter.
My keep awake material on this trip was my 3 year old GameBoy Advance SP, which still seems to hold an extraordinarily long charge -- 8+ hours, even with the screen lit. I'm a quarter of the way through Advance Wars 2's Hard Campaign now (I started the Hard Campaign at the beginning of the flight).
Coming back from San Jose was an interesting trip -- I mistakenly hopped on the airport shuttle that takes you to the VTA Light Rail Station rather than the one destined for CalTrain -- but VTA runs to downtown Mountain View anyways, so the trip ended up being a little cheaper, but a little longer. Dragging five bags of stuff down through Castro Street was definitely not the highlight of the return journey home.
I'll be doing a complete writeup with the events and photos of my Japan trip as soon as I organize all the material.
Quick trivia:
- Over 3,000 photos were taken over the 2 weeks worth of travel.
- I covered 410 kilometers in one day going from Hakodate to Sapporo to Wakkanai over the course of 9 hours.
- Shinkansen are the fastest way to travel by land in Tokyo, going over 250 km/h.
- Japan gets more varieties of everything including KitKats, colors for electronics, and Pocky.
- The abundance of vending machines makes dehydration nearly impossible.
You know, Mike. You could have just taken the shuttle bus instead of putting yourself through the agony of dragging five bags of stuff from SJC. What you did was definitely cost-effective, but it was painful. =/
--------