Days 103-105: Leaving Tokyo (A Fucking Fiasco)

My flight to Chengdu didn't leave until 8:30pm so I found a cafe (Starbucks...) to sit in before coming back to the hostel to pick up my bags and buy lunch and dinner at the nearby supermarket. I left for Narita International Airport at 4:30pm, though Google told me it would only take an hour to get to the airport if I took the metro to Ueno Station and from Ueno took something called the "Skyliner" to the airport.

When I got to the JR Station in Ueno I surveyed the route map, didn't find anything clearly marked "Skyliner", but there was only one line that went out to Narita airport, so I bought a platform ticket and found the appropriate platform. When the train arrived it was labeled "Narita Express" so you knew it was fast. It wasn't.

The only thing express about the train was that it skipped 5 or 6 local stops on its way to Narita, but it still took 2.5 hours to get to Narita Station. From Narita Station I had to transfer trains to the Airport line. My flight left in one hour by this point. Luckily there was a train on the Airport line already waiting at the station and left within a minute of my boarding. Naturally, the terminal my flight left from was the final of the two stops along the Airport line. When I alighted at Terminal 1, my flight left in 45 minutes.

Naturally, the train drops you at floor B1, but the departures leave from the fourth floor. I didn't know this, so after paying off my platform ticket at the ticket counter I ripped up the escalators, stopping at a few information desks to ask where the Sichuan Airlines check-in was located. When I arrived out of breath at the check-in desk, they had already closed. My flight would be leaving in 35 minutes. They called the gate to ask if they were still able to accept me. They weren't. I'd missed my flight.

The next Sichuan flight to Chengdu didn't leave for 48 hours. They told me to contact the travel agency I had bought the ticket through (expedia.co.jp) to get my ticket date moved. It was 8pm on a Friday. I knew Expedia's customer service wasn't going to give a flying fuck until Monday, after the next flight would have already left. I emailed them anyways. (I turned out to be correct).

That was a stressful wall of text. Here's a squirrel driving his airplane.

I considered staying overnight at the airport, being (what I thought was) hours away from Tokyo and unfamiliar with the accommodation and transportation around Narita, but at 11pm decided instead to take the "Airport Limousine" bus back to central Tokyo and from there take the metro to the capsule hotel I had stayed at my first nights in Tokyo because I knew the reception was open 24 hours and they probably had room for me. After alighting from the bus and taking the metro to Oshiage, I tried taking the Tobu line to Asakusa Station, but a platform officer told me I had already missed the last train back. So I roamed the streets around Oshiage Station until I was able to wave down a taxi to take me to the hotel. When I arrived at Hotel Kawase some time past 1am I was able to book a capsule for the night.

The next morning I woke up to the little old lady that works at the hotel half slapping my backside, half spanking me awake. I hadn't forgotten that the check-out time was 10am, I just hadn't cared enough to set an alarm the night before. I told her I wanted to book one more night, but she only speaks Japanese, and so went to retrieve the other lady that works at the reception. The other lady walks into the room, says to me "Hello, pay money now" and walks out.  I thought the whole scenario was mildly hilarious given how excessively polite Japanese people usually are. I booked one more night and spent the rest of the day looking for affordable tickets out of Tokyo -- either to Chengdu to catch my flight out of Chengdu, or to Bangkok to be ready for my flight to Bucharest. Regular, one-way flights to both Chengdu and Bangkok within the next few days were both around 350 USD (something I did NOT want to pay after paying less than 300 USD for Tokyo to Chengdu and Chengdu to Bangkok combined, plus they were terrible itineraries layover-wise), but I eventually found two one-way tickets -- one from Tokyo to Okinawa (Naha), the other from Okinawa to Bangkok -- for a combined total of less than 200 USD that would leave the next day. My flight from Tokyo left at 10am, so I woke at 6am, after three hours of sleep, to take the airport limousine bus back to Narita Airport around 7am.

The flight to Okinawa went off without a hitch and I spent the rest of the afternoon in nearby Naha. My flight to Bangkok didn't leave until 10pm.

Naha is a small, charming, humid subtropical Japanese town of about 320,000 residents. I visited a few parks while I was there. One of the parks has a beach.

The lone metro-like transportation service of the island can take you from the airport to north Naha

Near the pier

At 7:30pm I rode the monorail back to OKA and took a shuttle bus to the LCC terminal -- where all the budget airlines fly out of. When I punched in my booking number at the check-in machine it gave me an error and I had to ask an attendant to check me in manually. She worked on my ticket for a while, then came back to tell me I had booked my flight for a different date. I couldn't believe it, but when I checked my booking confirmation email, it had written on it Sunday, May 7th instead of Sunday, April 23. Somehow I had managed to screw myself over twice and buy a ticket for two weeks after I wanted to fly out of Okinawa.

Of course the airline couldn't just pat me on the back, tell me everyone makes mistakes, and move my ticket to today, so my two options were to stay in Okinawa and try to book an affordable flight to Bangkok by Wednesday morning, or shell out ¥24,000 for a new ticket on the same flight I had thought I paid ¥9,000 for the day before. At that point it was 8:30pm on a Sunday and I didn't trust myself to buy anymore flight tickets, so I begrudgingly handed over my debit card for the attendant to swipe while I drowned in an ocean of self-loathing.

If I had known I would have spent over 700 USD on flight tickets by the time I left Tokyo and arrived in Bangkok I would have bought myself the best first-class ticket with foot jacuzzi and therapy dog included and saved myself the stress -- and some money too, probably.

The gates at the LCC terminal are nearly monostic. There's a single room with chairs shared among the two gates, but not enough seats for everyone -- so 20-30% of passengers need to sit on the floor or stand. There's no wi-fi and no drinking fountain. The seat they had sold me wasn't expensive because it was nice, it was expensive (probably) because budget airlines' entire business model is only sustainable because of people like me.

I sat near the back of the plane (though the middle seat was unoccupied in my section, which was nice). Partway through the 4.5 hour flight we passed a lightning storm while flying over Laos. It was amazing to watch from above. I think if someone had given a lecture just then on how lightning works and what happens when lightning strikes a plane I would have remembered what they said for the rest of my life. I think teaching science facts while the topic of interest simultaneously potentially threatens your life could be a highly effective pedagogical technique.

I took a video with my phone, but it's absolute crap. It did look very similar to this, though:

After landing in BKK I took a taxi to Speakeasy Homestay, which I had previously stayed at my first two weeks in Bangkok. It was two in the morning by the time I arrived. Exhausted, but relieved to be done with all foreseeable bullshit, I took a cool shower before falling asleep in the un-air-conditioned, 85 degree Fahrenheit dorm room.