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Japan 2.0: The Traveling

By Nick Hodge | July 6, 2007

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Up at 6:00am, arrive at air­port at 8:30am and through checkin, cus­toms and immig­ra­tion. Our checked in bag­gage weighs 31kg; and other carry on is 25kg.  Includ­ing assor­ted liquids under 100ml.

OK, what’s the deal with put­ting your 100ml liquids into a plastic bag. The secur­ity guys at Sydney Inter­na­tional grabbed some poor Chinese student’s fish oil tab­lets and poured them into a plastic bag. Then handed him the plastic bag and the empty con­tainer. The poor bemused stu­dent just walked away. Still can­not work out why the bag­gie was required.

The exchange rate with Japan Yen is highly favour­able for this trip: Travelex at the air­port is 94.4 Yen to 1 AU. If you are a NZ’er, time to come to AU as the exchange rate is 1:1. Quick pur­chases at the air­port included a new Lonely Planet City Guide for Tokyo.

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Through Gate 31 onto the Jet­Star Air­bus A330-202 into our Star­class seats. Yes, Star­class. Paid the extra and the unex­pec­ted res­ult was 5 seats over 3 of us. Star­class to Osaka Kan­sai was 50% full. Half of the Eco­nomy seats were pop­u­lated with about 2000 Japan­ese school girls.

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Sleep­ing over PNG, watch­ing vari­ous movies on the small, self-contained “digi-E-Players”. Jet­Star gets a solid 7 out of 10. –1 for food, –1 for lack of movie selec­tion and –1 for the old, slighlty smelly Air­bus. Looks dis­tinctly like a Qantas hand-me-down.

Land­ing took all the Kan­sai ter­minal build­ings. Yes, we landed at one end of the ter­minal at a couple of hun­dred kms/hr and slowed down and taxi’d into the other end of the ter­minal. It’s that big. Our arrival gate, gate 6, was sponsored by Panasonic.

Liam meets Samjung at Immig­ra­tion con­trol. Same school and year as Liam, but from Korea. Arrived in Osaka on a Qantas flight yet was 10 people ahead of us in the immig­ra­tion line. Their fam­ily plans is to go to Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios in Osaka.

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We’re through immig­ra­tion, col­lec­ted the 31kg behemoth bag and onto the Lim­ousine bus to Osaka CBD within 10 minutes. Osaka is 25degC and rather humid, fully expected.

A 50 minute ride through the Kan­sai night look­ing at love hotels, pachinko bars, canals, heavy indus­trial works and finally Osaka.

Lemon fla­voured beer? Liam explores the min­i­bar which has lemon gel. The dun­nies are very mod­ern with their heated clean­ing jets (DO WANT) and more knobs and dials than a Rus­sian spacesta­tion.  Gel drinks. Toi­lets. Wow.

The future is ver­tical people. Ver­tical. Everything is vertical.

I love arriv­ing into new places at night. The morn­ing always surprises.

Topics: hodgejapanjul07, personal | 1 Comment »

One Response to “Japan 2.0: The Traveling”

  1. Fi Says:
    July 6th, 2007 at 12:26 am

    Have a great hol­i­day, fam­ily Hodge! Some­thing tells me Liam might have pre­ferred the Japan­ese school­girls in cattle class…

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