I fly fairly frequently from where I live now to my hometown. It’s a convenient trip because there are two conveniently located mini-boss sized airports close to both places. The (un)fortunate thing about mini-boss sized airports is that they only attract the budget airline offerings. When you purchase flights through these low-spec’d airlines, they try and swindle you by charging you for making choices, like do you want to bring any bags? How about choose a seat to sit in the plane? At first, I thought choosing a seat was part of the fare: these slippery execs won’t let me fly unless I have a boarding pass AND a seat ticket! I’ve learned however, that it is a false choice.

Japan’s Hospitality

Waking up this morning we weren’t in a rush, but we felt like we had no idea how to get to our next stay in Oshino, near Mt. Fuji. We packed our bags, which got exceptionally more full in just three days, and walked over to the Shinjuku station. We found some helpful guides to talk us through which tickets we needed and we headed out on a two hour bus ride to Oshino. We drove through some beautiful scenery, greens yellows and reds stretched on before us as our little bus meandered through the twisting highway roads. Near the end of the trip, we rounded a bend that opened up to an impressive vista of Mt. Fuji, peaking through the clouds above us. I was shocked just how high up the peak rose above the surrounding landscape. Once we arrived, our AirBnB host was waiting to give us a lift to his house. He must be the sweetest old Japanese man in Oshino, he treated us so kindly, telling us stories, asking us our plans and giving us advice on where to go. He even drove us to the station we needed to go to tomorrow and helped us get the right tickets in advance.

We Made It

My wife and I finally get to experience first hand all of the things we watched in anime.

Flight Experience

We had a short flight to Seattle early in the morning, an hour wait, then hopped on the massive 10-people-per-row, serves-you-two-meals passenger plane. I’ve never flown internationally to this extent, so this was all very new experiece for me. The food was surprisingly delicious, my butt was unsurprisingly sore after a 9.5 hour flight. Things passed honestly quicker than I anticipated. We arrived in Japan at 2PM the next day. Pretty trippy, but sleeping on the plane kinda felt like we didn’t just lose a day to the time-zone lords. We were both pretty frazzled after getting off the plane, but there were a ton of Japanese people pointing and holding signs of where to go to get processed through the system. When I was getting my fringerprints scanned, I didn’t know it was also taking a picture. My nose was itchy so I did what anyone would do with an itchy nose and occupied hands, I scrunched my face rapidly and desperately. When my fingers were done it showed me my lemon-head motion-blurred image of a fugitive. Hopefully there is no system that flags me. Inside the airport, we purchased a SIM card for one of our phones to have data, and luckily found super friendly english-speaking worker that told us how to get to our hotel. We took a short one hour bus ride from Haneda to Shinjuku where we will be staying for the next three days.

Japan is Fond of Their Cats

My wife and I have two cats of our own, so naturally we had to experience the cat love Japan had to give. When you walk down any main street, you can’t go many meters (making my nod to the metric) without seeing some sort of cat on billboards, store front signs, etc. We found a hosted experience of a ‘walk in a cat-loving community’ and had to try it. We planned most of our day around meeting En at 1pm in Nippori.