I have always said that I enjoy traveling, though I think anyone that I have actually traveled with would tell you that that is not, in the strictest sense, true. I think my attitude and the degree to which I complain about everything from the comfort of the airplane to the amount of time spent waiting for said airplane suggests that what I really enjoy is being other places. Of course, this is not an altogether unusual perspective. I think most people would prefer to be able to close their eyes the instant they get in the car or on the plane and not wake up until they arrived at their destination. This is a skill that I have tried to develop, and in the case of cars I have been largely successful. My inability to drive for more than an hour without becoming a danger to myself and others is a testament to that. With planes though, it is much more difficult, probably because I rarely have the occasion to practice them.
Though my preamble would suggest otherwise, my trip to Japan was largely uneventful, and I did, in fact manage to spend about 12 hours of my plane rides sleeping. I arrived at the Minneapolis airport shortly after six on Monday morning running on no sleep, as I had intentionally stayed up all night in order to make sleeping on the plane easier. I think I fell asleep briefly while waiting to board, as I was the last one on the plane, and then I immediately fell back asleep and didn’t wake up until we were in Chicago, which has a remarkable airport. The corridor I walked down must have been at least a kilometer long, and two or three stories high. It was certainly impressive, but I wasn’t fully awake at the time, and so can remember little aside from the skeleton of a large sauropod and lots of neon.
Once I was on the plane heading to Japan I fell asleep again, though more easily this time (Japanese airlines being quite a bit more comfortable than their American counterparts) and though I woke several times during the flight, I didn’t wake up completely until about three hours before arrival. The plane wasn’t crowded, the seat next to me and the entire row ahead were empty, though that just meant I wasn’t disturbing anyone when I kicked the back of the seat in front of me. Everything went pretty smoothly until about an hour before we arrived in Tokyo, at which point I decided to acknowledge the fact that I was going to have to change airports once I arrived, and I had no idea how to do that or how I was going to check in once I arrived at the new airport. Fortunately, the process of switching airports was much less painful than I had expected, it was merely a matter of paying $30 for a 45 minute bus ride across town, which was interesting in its newness.
The problem with letting other people handle your travel arrangements, particularly if those people are not going to be traveling with you, is that certain things tend to be overlooked. In this case, what was overlooked was the fact that to check in at a Japanese airport I need one of four things: a ticket receipt, which I didn’t have, the number of the credit card that had been used to purchase the ticket, which wasn’t available either, a card with the airline I had taken, or a registered Japanese cellphone, another thing sadly outside my grasp. Given that I had none of these things, and that I had seven hours before my plane was scheduled to depart, I decided to wander aimlessly until I thought of something that might help, which turned out to take about half an hour. Eventually I talked to somebody that worked for my airline and, after about 20 minutes of frowning at a computer screen, they were able to find me in some abandoned corner of their system. After that, I spent about four hours sitting around waiting for my plane, caught it on time, and arrived in Akita without incident. Oddly, the Akita airport seems to be designed by the same people that built the Missoula airport, right down to the baggage claim. After catching a cab to the university, I spent another hour filling out forms and figuring where I was going to be staying, before I found my room and went to bed.
All in all the day was pretty remarkable in that it was so unremarkable. Things rarely fall into place for me in a favorable way, so I spent much of my travel time waiting for something to go terribly wrong, and it confuses me that it never did. As of right now, I am still waiting, and expect the sky to begin crumbling at any moment.

This is me

Preflight

I leave for the airport in less than an hour, and I think I’m finally starting to feel a little bit nervous. I tend to have a hard time looking into the future, (and thus my ability to plan ahead has never been something to be proud of) and so I can’t really feel nervous or excited about things until they are right on top of me. Such is the case tonight. I have so far been unable to acknowledge that I’m about to spend the next day and a half traveling, and then a year studying in Japan. Now though, given that I have to count the amount of time before my departure in minutes, rather than hours or days, I think I’m starting to realize that this is actually happening. I sometimes wonder if this means I lack creativity. My inability to foresee a change in my circumstance has resulted in severe procrastination on my part, and this has, of course, created problems. That is not really important at the moment though. I can feel the change now, and looking forward involves acknowledging that things are about to change.