My trip starts on Tuesday. In Guam you can take your luggage to the airport here the night before and check it in, so you don't have to stand in line with all the Japanese tourists the morning of your flight. That plus all the flights leave so early in the morning it just saves you that much more time at the airport at 5AM. So for contrast later, I go through the security checkpoint no problems, but I have to take off my shoes. They go through the X-Ray no problem and all my stuff plops out the other side where the 400 pound security person (I refuse to call them an officer of any kind) just kind of nudges towards the end of the table, saying nothing. So I have to grab all my stuff put it back in my backpack and find a place to put my shoes back on, which is at least twenty feet away. I also exchanged $50 for 5000 yen, which as I found out later I got ripped off by about ten dollars. So the lesson here is never exchange money at those booths at the airport just use an ATM when you get to the country your going to, that way your bank does the exchange and you usually get the best rates. So I do that and go to wait for my plane. The picture above is from my plane before we descend on mainland Japan.
We get on the plane and I notice that I am the only English speaker there. When I say only that includes the flight crew. They speak English the way Mel Gibson talks when he is drunk. All the words are there, just completely inappropriate for the situation. They offer me an English newspaper which actually fairly well written. This is where the fun begins. They start doing all the in flight announcements but in Japanese. The standard spiel but it goes on for at least fifteen minutes. Then in English I get, "Please buckle up seatbelt, take off soon". That's it?? What diatribe did you just give the Japanese people that I missed out on? Either way we get going and its fairly smooth until we get over Japan. I guess they are also in typhoon season and it shows by the flight. We start bouncing and shaking and again I listen to a ten minute lecture in Japanese about something, and in English I get "Fasten belts, captain says turbulence". So we land fairly ok, but I notice there is water everywhere, the airport is built into this marina in Nagoya. The above and below pictures are from the air, over Japan.
We land and begin to get off the plane. The Japanese waste no time. Its not like an American flight where everybody is so eager to stand up but then takes twenty minutes a person getting their luggage down from the overhead and just goofing off. Within two minutes of being at the gate everyone is off the plane. We get off and the airport is very clean. There are the moving walkways the entire length of where we have to walk, leading us all the way to Customs. I get up to Customs and Immigration and it was no problem. They also spoke very little English but were very very very polite. Always smiling and asking instead of just barking orders. Very nice.
Once you go through all the government services you pop out in the main lobby of the airport. I had to re check in and go through security again. I go to the airline counter and check in and even though not one word of English was spoken I managed to check in my luggage get my ticket and figure out where I needed to go. They even gave me a little map. Again extremely polite. I walk around the airport a little, its four stories but the two of those are the departing and arriving flights. They have a lot of little restaurants and stores but nothing really exciting to buy. A lot of it was dried shrimp chips and things like that. The above picture I believe is a character for Centrair, which is either the name of the airport or one of the stores, but I did not see an airline with that name.
Next I get to go through the Japanese security. I walk up, and they have at least 10 lines on either side of the airport, and there were no lines whatsoever. I get up there put my stuff in the little bins, and they let me keep everything in my backpack. They didn't make me pull everything out and use ten trays to go through. They ask very politely and even apologize in English for asking me to take off my shoes. I take them off and they handed me slippers to wear as I walked through the metal detector. I walked a total of two feet and they had a chair waiting for me and actually brought me my shoes and took the slippers. Again, US I walk twenty feet in my socks, Japan, two feet in slippers they gave me. Nice.
I start walking around and really wanted to try actual Japanese green tea. Above is probably the worst tasting drink I have had in about five years. Its bitter and just weird.
Above is what my Japanese airline ticket looked like. I'm just glad that I could read the numbers. Below is the Japanese bathroom. Every bathroom I saw there was the cleanest bathroom I have ever seen.
I don't get it either. I'll spare you the details but suffice it to say the Japanese do not read in the bathroom.
This is the hand dryer. Where the three white circles are you place your hands in, and it blow drys your hands, but its ten thousand times better than the standard blow dryer. It angles the air down so the water just runs off your hands, not like here where its just hot air.
After my horrible green tea experience I decided to try something I recognized. The can was pretty cool, its an aluminum can, but in bottle shape.
No matter what you do, for the love of all that's holy, DO NOT PLAY ON THE TRAVELATOR.
Neither should you invite a tall skinny Betty boop to the airport in Japan, it might kill her.
There were only about ten of these at the airport but once I got to Okinawa there was one about every 100 feet on every street everywhere. Each one has a variety of cola, tea and coffee, and some of the coffee is even hot. One brand is called Boss and they had pictures of Tommy Lee Jones on all their ads.
This is a map of the bathroom. If you can read it it actually lays out which bathroom stalls are western style or Japanese hole in the floor style.
They had golf tees in their urinals. Japanese love golf.
This is where I sat for three hours waiting for my next flight. Not bad, but about 200 Japanese school kids also sat here, and walked around. All the Japanese school kids had to wear uniforms, but apparently their hair can be as long, or spiked or mohawked as they wanted. Its funny to see them so uptight about the uniform but all other appearance standards are non existent.
Now for the truly weird. We get on the plane, and it looks like the 70's threw up. All the seats are funky blues and oranges. They have three "TV" screens, but they are projectors not actual TV's. We are getting ready to take off and I look up, I see what I thought was that animation they play when you take off of the runway. It was just a still photo of the runway and they usually have a cartoon plane take off. Well we get going and the picture moves! They actually have a camera in the nose of the plane and you get to watch everything as you take off and again when you land. I look up again and I see ocean and boats, then I look out the window and see that same boat beneath me. It was one of the neatest things I have ever seen and also one of the most fear/vertigo inducing things I have ever seen. Again no real English is spoken, but the flight was nearly empty so they let me move to an entire row by myself. About 45 minutes before we landed they made an announcement that we were landing. (I did not know we were still 45 minutes away) so that made for the longest approach I have ever had. We were below the cloud cover for almost that entire 45 minutes, which is odd, because every other plane I have ever been on waits till the last 15 or so minutes to actually get within landing distance. We are now merely hundreds of feet above Okinawa and they play this video, with three Japanese women doing stretches and exercises in their seats, to help relieve the stress of flying. I look around and there are actually quite a few people doing them, it was at least 20 minutes of stretching and moving. Thank goodness I had my own aisle.
Here is Okinawa. I don't know what I was expecting, not pagoda's everywhere but at least more Japanese culture or language. Most of the signs were written in English and it somewhat resembled Guam. Its an island, water everywhere, lots of plants. The building did seem taller here and there were a few Japanese mausoleums that looked really old.
Here is my room. In comparison to my empty three bedroom house I had a fully furnished one room with a king bed, a computer with Internet access (free), honor bar (everything including alcohol was less than a dollar, but I stuck to the Pepsi) cable TV, free movie rentals, and the TV even played DVD's.
Here is a little Japanese garden outside of my hotel.
Oh whats this? Yes, a Macaroni Grill in Okinawa. The next night I ate at Chili's. It was an eerie twilight zone feeling. Its American food but everyone working at these places are Japanese, so it just felt kind of wrong.
Here is a little look at the country side of Okinawa. This is on my way to assist with an excavation on a Japanese hillside. Some archaeologists found a skull, so we went digging for the rest of it. I was up to my knees in Japanese mud, with spiders as big as my fist. Not pretty. Luckily it rained every other day and not the day we were in the forest, but it did make everything turn to mud. I ended up having to buy new shoes immediately following the dig.
This is a Japanese coke can. It was huge, I would say about 9 inches tall.
These are some views from my hotel balcony. It looks kind of dark and dreary but its because it was rainy season there too. For the most part if I didn't tell you this was Japan you probably wouldn't be able to tell just from the pictures. Except for that Japanese house close up two pics down.
I think this picture says eat more beef.
They had A&W restaurants everywhere! They really played up the whole "American Food" angle. In fact I have never seen more A&W's anywhere. They actually outnumbered the McDonalds here.
We don't have this in the states. It tasted like regular Pepsi, but maybe its a special diet one, like one calorie, or substitute sugar. I didn't ask so it could have been soy Pepsi, but it tasted fine, much better than that green tea.
And here is my last shot, leaving the airport in Okinawa. This is what I can remember right off the bat, but I will add more in a later posting.
This is a little psycho looking picture, I just thought it looked cool.
The worlds biggest little Christmas tree!
We get on the plane and I notice that I am the only English speaker there. When I say only that includes the flight crew. They speak English the way Mel Gibson talks when he is drunk. All the words are there, just completely inappropriate for the situation. They offer me an English newspaper which actually fairly well written. This is where the fun begins. They start doing all the in flight announcements but in Japanese. The standard spiel but it goes on for at least fifteen minutes. Then in English I get, "Please buckle up seatbelt, take off soon". That's it?? What diatribe did you just give the Japanese people that I missed out on? Either way we get going and its fairly smooth until we get over Japan. I guess they are also in typhoon season and it shows by the flight. We start bouncing and shaking and again I listen to a ten minute lecture in Japanese about something, and in English I get "Fasten belts, captain says turbulence". So we land fairly ok, but I notice there is water everywhere, the airport is built into this marina in Nagoya. The above and below pictures are from the air, over Japan.
We land and begin to get off the plane. The Japanese waste no time. Its not like an American flight where everybody is so eager to stand up but then takes twenty minutes a person getting their luggage down from the overhead and just goofing off. Within two minutes of being at the gate everyone is off the plane. We get off and the airport is very clean. There are the moving walkways the entire length of where we have to walk, leading us all the way to Customs. I get up to Customs and Immigration and it was no problem. They also spoke very little English but were very very very polite. Always smiling and asking instead of just barking orders. Very nice.
Once you go through all the government services you pop out in the main lobby of the airport. I had to re check in and go through security again. I go to the airline counter and check in and even though not one word of English was spoken I managed to check in my luggage get my ticket and figure out where I needed to go. They even gave me a little map. Again extremely polite. I walk around the airport a little, its four stories but the two of those are the departing and arriving flights. They have a lot of little restaurants and stores but nothing really exciting to buy. A lot of it was dried shrimp chips and things like that. The above picture I believe is a character for Centrair, which is either the name of the airport or one of the stores, but I did not see an airline with that name.
Next I get to go through the Japanese security. I walk up, and they have at least 10 lines on either side of the airport, and there were no lines whatsoever. I get up there put my stuff in the little bins, and they let me keep everything in my backpack. They didn't make me pull everything out and use ten trays to go through. They ask very politely and even apologize in English for asking me to take off my shoes. I take them off and they handed me slippers to wear as I walked through the metal detector. I walked a total of two feet and they had a chair waiting for me and actually brought me my shoes and took the slippers. Again, US I walk twenty feet in my socks, Japan, two feet in slippers they gave me. Nice.
I start walking around and really wanted to try actual Japanese green tea. Above is probably the worst tasting drink I have had in about five years. Its bitter and just weird.
Above is what my Japanese airline ticket looked like. I'm just glad that I could read the numbers. Below is the Japanese bathroom. Every bathroom I saw there was the cleanest bathroom I have ever seen.
I don't get it either. I'll spare you the details but suffice it to say the Japanese do not read in the bathroom.
This is the hand dryer. Where the three white circles are you place your hands in, and it blow drys your hands, but its ten thousand times better than the standard blow dryer. It angles the air down so the water just runs off your hands, not like here where its just hot air.
After my horrible green tea experience I decided to try something I recognized. The can was pretty cool, its an aluminum can, but in bottle shape.
No matter what you do, for the love of all that's holy, DO NOT PLAY ON THE TRAVELATOR.
Neither should you invite a tall skinny Betty boop to the airport in Japan, it might kill her.
There were only about ten of these at the airport but once I got to Okinawa there was one about every 100 feet on every street everywhere. Each one has a variety of cola, tea and coffee, and some of the coffee is even hot. One brand is called Boss and they had pictures of Tommy Lee Jones on all their ads.
This is a map of the bathroom. If you can read it it actually lays out which bathroom stalls are western style or Japanese hole in the floor style.
They had golf tees in their urinals. Japanese love golf.
This is where I sat for three hours waiting for my next flight. Not bad, but about 200 Japanese school kids also sat here, and walked around. All the Japanese school kids had to wear uniforms, but apparently their hair can be as long, or spiked or mohawked as they wanted. Its funny to see them so uptight about the uniform but all other appearance standards are non existent.
Here is Okinawa. I don't know what I was expecting, not pagoda's everywhere but at least more Japanese culture or language. Most of the signs were written in English and it somewhat resembled Guam. Its an island, water everywhere, lots of plants. The building did seem taller here and there were a few Japanese mausoleums that looked really old.
Here is my room. In comparison to my empty three bedroom house I had a fully furnished one room with a king bed, a computer with Internet access (free), honor bar (everything including alcohol was less than a dollar, but I stuck to the Pepsi) cable TV, free movie rentals, and the TV even played DVD's.
Here is a little Japanese garden outside of my hotel.
Oh whats this? Yes, a Macaroni Grill in Okinawa. The next night I ate at Chili's. It was an eerie twilight zone feeling. Its American food but everyone working at these places are Japanese, so it just felt kind of wrong.
Here is a little look at the country side of Okinawa. This is on my way to assist with an excavation on a Japanese hillside. Some archaeologists found a skull, so we went digging for the rest of it. I was up to my knees in Japanese mud, with spiders as big as my fist. Not pretty. Luckily it rained every other day and not the day we were in the forest, but it did make everything turn to mud. I ended up having to buy new shoes immediately following the dig.
This is a Japanese coke can. It was huge, I would say about 9 inches tall.
These are some views from my hotel balcony. It looks kind of dark and dreary but its because it was rainy season there too. For the most part if I didn't tell you this was Japan you probably wouldn't be able to tell just from the pictures. Except for that Japanese house close up two pics down.
I think this picture says eat more beef.
They had A&W restaurants everywhere! They really played up the whole "American Food" angle. In fact I have never seen more A&W's anywhere. They actually outnumbered the McDonalds here.
We don't have this in the states. It tasted like regular Pepsi, but maybe its a special diet one, like one calorie, or substitute sugar. I didn't ask so it could have been soy Pepsi, but it tasted fine, much better than that green tea.
