So... I'm here!

My day started at 11pm on Thursday 13th: I woke up from my Nytol induced slumber and started finalising my preparations for Japan. At 4.45, I headed off for Digbeth Coach Station in Birmingham, a dreary place and difficult to find with a pre-new Bullring map! My coach was half an hour late setting off, but we managed to get to Terminal 4 on time... I noticed that the camera on top of the coach (which they show on the TV) was deceptively reassuring: it is fish eyed, so cars are further away than in real life. With the inability to see through the windscreen from the seating, it certainly made you have more confidence in the driver than you have otherwise.

But regardless, after an hour's wait in the queue for KLM check-in (for some reason they only had two desks open to start with) I was finally in the Departure Lounge and lamenting the amount of shopping available. I was happy to get underway to Amsterdam, and the flight went quickly. We had a nice cheese sandwich, really great...

At Amsterdam I did something pretty stupid... I bought an MP3 player, less than 50 Euros... It is a rechargable battery one so I couldn't use it (needs to be charged for 8 hours first time round), but apart from that, I'm heading to electronics central! After going through the departure gate, and having a security guy say he was disappointed that I have Win XP on my laptop, people started boarding without being told... I went but then went back to the lounge. More stupidly, when I got on the plane, having checked my pass several times, I sat in the wrong row!

The 10 hour flight to Osaka was long... obviously! I sat in the aisle, but the leg room under the chair in front was halfed by the electronics support column. Each seat had an entertainment system with a collection of films, tv series, games, music to select by choice. I watched 16 Blocks, was actually not too bad, but I think they edited it a bit, it seemed to be only 1hr 20 mins. I also watched Kencho no Hoshi, which wasn't too bad... just a bit boring, like a feature length drama. The selection was pretty good.

The food was also good... there were several meals: dinner (I had beef gyudon with sushi, and stuff... but I only ate the gyudon), cup noodle midnight snack, and breakfast (cereal bagel, yoghurt and actimel). The staff were nice, in fact, one of them looked exactly like Minako, but only taller! What did not go so well was the sleep... I had a screaming kid behind me who started crying just when I wanted to sleep... I managed to have a nap of some kind, but it was hardly enough.

Landing at Osaka, even just getting onto the tunnel up to the fake monorail transport (it's just a bus in a confined space), I immediately felt the heat (or more importantly, humidity). Oh god it's hot here... ungodly so! I waited for 20 minutes for a bus to Kyoto Station and from there a bus to where I'm staying. It was long and uncomfortably warm, and I was overdressed... I couldn't be bothered to change on the plane.

After a shower, I immediately felt the day catching up with me. So I had a nap... and woke up at 9pm local time! It's only 2pm back home! I'm watching TV now... the lead of SMAP's show has several famous faces... Misaki Ito (Hermes from Densha Otoko.... yummy), Ryoko Yonosuke (from Love Revolution), Keiichi Yamamoto (same), and Abe Hiroshi (too many dramas to count!). They had to take penalties against a dog... Misaki Ito missed... practically an open goal! The dog kept cheating by moving out of the box though. Now they're looking at that expensive panda suit you may have seen shown on the internet.

Anyway, I'm being cooked for... might go out tonight, see if we can find an izakaya. It's been quite wet today, with lots of thunder (it's strange thunder, maybe because I'm not a city boy: the claps are staccato and really frequent and loud).

There's so much to be seen and to do... I really don't know where to start. I will undoubtedly take it slow for a few days, I need to acclimatise. I also need to take a trip into Osaka to get my international student card. Oh and I've got to head into Gion for the festival. On the 27th I will see Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra in concert (oh my god!) and some kabuki on the 29th. I'm also going to have to take the Shinkansen (bullet train)... orginally I was going to use the overnight coaches everywhere, but from Tokyo to Hiroshima just prior to the bon festival the coaches are all full.

I'm excited, even though I have to say that my first impressions of Japan were that it reminded me of Birmingham... hard to explain, but some of the parts of town are just run down like the outskirts of Brum.

Anyway, I'll end by thanking the inventor of AC, without it I would be a puddle!