Hello again.

June 9, 2005
Hello again everybody.

If you missed the first of these missives, it's nothing to worry about since it was all a bunch of domestic blah blah blah. Here is where the international part of my trip starts. I'm on another long flight and will, consequently, be writing another long e-mail to all of you. No apologies for the length; I have ambitions of some day being a novelist. But please don't feel like you have to read every word; skip any parts you want to, because I understand that I write things that are too long. I enjoyed spending some time in San Francisco with Andy and his family, and now I'm on my way across the ocean to the Land of the Rising Sun. I got up this morning and went to San Francisco International, where I made a couple of Stupid Traveler comments. (Occasionally, when you're only into the airport as deep as the front doors, you'll run into people who, believe it or not, are not taking the same flight you are and will neither relate to nor be able to comment on your particular itinerary. And thus were born my Stupid Traveler comments.) They let me on my flight anyway, and it was just a short hop down to Los Angeles.
This was the second time in my life that I've landed in a city that spreads out as far as you can see, and it's a weird feeling. Four million people is a very large amount of humans, but when you see something like Los Angeles or Sao Paulo, you almost think "Really? Just four million?" I've included the best picture I could get from the plane for your reference. After landing somewhere apparently on the outskirts of the city and taxiing all the way back in (we passed some sweet looking Qantas planes, which was
cool, but good grief, was that a lot of driving for a vehicle intended for the air), I got off and noticed that LAX looks much nicer than I expected.
Smooth landing at LAX, and my connection, fortunately, was in the same terminal. I was supposed to have forty minutes to make the connection, but we ended up a little early into LAX, so there was plenty of time to take a seat, talk to my brother and find out that my NEW NIECE was born this morning. Her name -and my advance apologies for possibly misspelling one or both names, because phones aren't good at these things- is Riley Katherine. Very exciting! Christopher and Bethany are parents. That's too cool.
I'm on a Boeing 777 (picture enclosed), and Mr. Miyagi's sensei is somewhere on board. I think, and I realize that I am speaking as a stereotyping animal of a Westerner here, that East Asians are the coolest-looking old people. It's just something about the snow white beard and deep wisdom and the impression I get that the guy could Zen-whip me to death without moving (but won't) that's very awe-inspiring.
I'm so ecstatic to finally be under way across the Pacific. This trip has sort of been a few years in the making. I've had the ticket since February, at least, and it's been quite a test of patience waiting for it to finally come.
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The flight map channel on the little mini-TV in front of me says we're exactly four hours from landing in Tokyo, and it also says that we're just about to cross the International Date Line within probably fifteen minutes. Oop. Yeah. There it was. That was a weird sensation. OK, seriously, the IDL (I think I'm allowed to use such familiar terms, having now traveled over it personally) is an interesting invention. It makes you go back in time when traveling east. Observe the following from my return itinerary:
Tokyo to Los Angeles:
American Airlines flight number 170 departing from Tokyo at 4:25 PM on June 21st, arriving at 10:10 AM on June 21st.
This, as I'm sure you're already thinking, is wild. If there are enough jiggawatts to pull it off at 88 miles per hour, we should certainly be able to pull it off at 536, which we're currently going.
American Airlines' sushi and sashimi are surprisingly edible. I mean, sure there's the incentive of having a discriminating audience on board, a good 70% of the passengers being Japanese, but I was still somewhat impressed. Not being, honestly, the world's foremost connoisseur of sushi, I'm easily impressed. Then again, we're only seven miles from the ocean, so it could be pretty fresh.
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We're now a little over 600 miles from Tokyo (this is practically bike riding distance, really, though not from our current location), and we have one more imaginary line to cross before entering the airspace of Japan Standard Time. Japan doesn't observe daylight savings time, so I don't know why the word "standard" is included, but then there are an awful lot of things I don't understand. There is quite a little twinge of excitement that comes with looking at the progress monitor when it gets to the zoomed-in view and seeing Wuhan, Seoul, Sapporo, and of course Tokyo, where it said Bering Strait just a few hours ago. Our travel trajectory was something like a lazy left field fly ball, up and over, and we're at the point now where Griffey has seen the pitch and swing, run down the landing spot, planted himself, and is just about to stick his glove into the air and prepare for the catch. Flying in an arc like this, while probably extending our total flight time slightly, decreases our chances of a water landing dramatically, and there are those who take great comfort in this when riding a 777, which has only two engines, according to my brother Scott, whose familiarity and expertise with aviation and aircraft rivals Billy Graham's grasp of the four spiritual laws. And that's the brother that doesn't work for the airline.
Things are pure white outside in every direction, and the cabin feels like it. It's making me a little dizzy to try and focus on the squirming computer screen during the fluff cycle here. We're landing in just over an hour. And American Airlines also serves very good fresh pineapple and passable udon noodles.
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So apparently a typhoon was arriving the same time as me, and the Japanese weather service also announced today the official beginning of Tsuyu, which is the rainy season. Things could always change, but it looks like Tuesday will be the non-rainy day of my stay here, with the rest of the time varying between a sneeze and a, well, a typhoon, which is not so much like a hurricane as it is what Virginians call a nor'easter. Should make for nice atmosphere on my journeys.
After way too much traveling, I am finally here. It's 9 PM, and I feel about like I should at 9 PM after pretty much a full day of traveling. We'll see how the hands of jetlag fate deal with me. I'll write again tomorrow, probably. Take care.

Kent