So getting flights out of and back into Tokyo is the easy part, but I would also have to get to Tokyo from my town to begin with. The nearest major city is about an hour and a half north by train, and then I would have to take a bus from the train station out to the airport to take a plane to Tokyo. There's also a smaller city with an airport to the south, but with the same inconvenience of needing to take a bus in between. In the end, adding up the amount of time it would take to take the train, wait for the next bus, padding for the security line, and the flight itself, and looking at the combined costs besides, if I was going to have to take the train for the first leg of the trip from my town to begin with, it would be easier and just as fast and a similar cost to just take the train all the way to Tokyo (transferring to the bullet train in the nearest big city). So what I ended up doing was just take the express train south from my town to the nearest big city, and catch the bullet train to Tokyo from there.
So then next was getting a flight out of Tokyo to arrive in time for the rehersal on Friday afternoon. Problem was, there wasn't the greatest selection of flight times, so the choice was pretty much between a flight leaving too late on Friday to get there before evening, or one leaving too early on Friday that no train would get to Tokyo early enough. I really didn't want to take the extra day and take Thursday off, especially since that's the day that I visit the elementary school that I only see once a week to begin with. Finally I hit on the idea that I could actually take the train down Thursday night after work and then still be able to catch the early flight without losing Thursday. The situation for my return was even more desperate, since there was absolutely no combination of flights and trains that would get me back into town on the same day as my arrival back in Japan, but applying the same split-day strategy to my return I could leave the US Sunday morning, get to Tokyo on Monday evening, and then head back Tuesday morning and still have some of the afternoon left over to unpack and unwind.
So the actual travel ended up being relatively uneventful. Thursday night in Tokyo I stayed at a cheap (in both senses of the word) place near the train station, which served a surprisingly fancy Japanese style breakfast in the basement in the morning before I headed out to the airport, which is an hour outside Tokyo. The main thing I had to be sure to get right at the airport was to get the re-entry permit at customs to make sure that I could actually get back into the country when I returned, but there was no problem there, it's just a little card you check a couple boxes on and the customs guy stamps it and you're all set. On the flight over I just did some reading and then found they actually had Kimi no Na wa in their movie library (or rather, I saw that the guy next to me was watching it), and with English subtitles to boot, so I rewatched that and was able to confirm that I had pretty much understood everything correctly the first time I watched it. Since I'm not Muslim or Mexican it was a piece of cake getting back into Trump's US. There's a kiosk you scan your passport at and answer a bunch of questions on-screen and it prints out a "receipt" that you take to the customs guy who scans it and asks you nothing but what your final destination is before letting you through. Easier than coming back from Canada.
Once I got back in the US it was of course impossible not to make comparisons to Japan, so here's just a short list of the obvious differences I immediately noticed:
- People standing in the middle of the escalator so no one can pass them.
- Fat people. I swear I've only seen one obese person the entire time I've been here, and only a few overweight people.
- Signs like this:
I guess this is the part where I say how nice it was to see everyone again and how beautiful the ceremony was and all that jazz, but most of the people reading this that I would be saying that to were there themselves, so I don't feel like there's really much to elaborate on. Even back in the US most of us live far enough apart that we don't see each other that often anyway, so really my being on the other side of the world doesn't make that much of a difference and it wasn't really anything different from getting to see everyone at any other time.
But I'll go ahead and write a little about it anyway. I got in Friday afternoon and my dad picked me up at the airport. One of his friends also happened to get in at the exact same time, so we met up with him and his wife and went into town together. I had a little time to crash in the hotel room with my dad, and then visited with my mom and her friend a little in her room before we all headed off to the rehersal. I found out I would be leading my mom down the aisle, but that was an easy enough job to practice. The chapel was just a cute little thing in the middle of a park, so a nice location. Afterward we had the dinner at a nice BBQ restaurant/bar, and a few other friends and relatives that had just gotten into town came, so it was nice to finally be meeting up with everyone for the first time in a while.
I crashed as early as I could that night because I was crazy jetlagged and knew I would end up waking up really early whether I wanted to or not, which is what happened, so I just went down to the lobby and read a magazine until everyone started waking up. When my mom and her friend came down we had breakfast at the hotel buffet, and met up with another friend of my dad's and his wife there, and eventually my dad woke up and joined us too. Then it was just hanging in the hotel room again for a little while until the ceremony. It went off without a hitch, nothing out of the ordinary, and then off to the reception. This is usually the most boring part of a wedding for me since I'm not a dancer, but there were plenty of people I hadn't seen in a while to hang out and talk with, so it wasn't too bad, except that I was still crazy jetlagged.
When we went back to the hotel afterwards we had convinced them to keep the bar open later than usual by promising them a lot of business from the wedding party, and we were able to keep that promise. I wanted to sleep so bad, but it was worth staying up late to hang out with everyone for a couple more hours before leaving, so I powered through it. Even back in the room I stayed up for another hour or so talking to my dad, since I was leaving early enough that I wouldn't really see him in the morning either.
So I left Sunday morning and mostly just slept on the plane. Since I was arriving in Tokyo earlier in the evening than when I had on Thursday night, I got an inn a bit further from the station which was actually in a cute little tucked-away neighborhood by the Ueno zoo that I wouldn't have expected to find the likes of in central Tokyo. Also found this in the lobby, which was cool:
And then I got back home the next day without incident.
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