Once again Chris and I are together in Japan.  At last.  Even though it’s just for a few weeks it’s still great to be here.  My flight over was amazingly long.  I left Coronado at 4pm on Wednesday, 1st flight left at 5:30pm to LAX.  2nd flight left LAX at 12:02am on Thursday.  We flew out over the ocean – off to Japan.  But then the plane turned right and flew north up the Central Valley of California, east of San Luis Obispo, up along the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, over Napa and Ukiah and finally at Eureka we headed out to sea.

Just after we were airborne, we were served a snack.  Then 9 hours later we were served a Japanese breakfast.  I wish I could have reached my camera to take a picture of it because it was quite something.  This breakfast consisted of rice, teriyaki salmon, vegees including lotus root and edamame, buckwheat noodles, tofu, thinly sliced hot pink things, pineapple, cantelope and honeydew melon slices, and a 1″ square of sweet cake.  Oh, and a cup of miso soup.  And tea, of course.  It’s still the middle of the night outside – 2:30am in Japan.

I arrived in Tokyo/Haneda at 11:45am Thursday – California time.  (0445 on Friday – Japan time.)  That means we were in the air from LAX to Tokyo for 12 hours!  And it was pitch black outside the entire time.  At this hour of the morning going through customs and immigration and baggage claim was a breeze.  From here I took a shuttle from the International terminal to Terminal 2.  The airport is so big it took 15 minutes to get there.  (And this is the smaller of the two airports in Tokyo.)  After de-icing the plane we were on our way to Iwakuni at 0930.  And by noon Chris and I were together again.

As you recall, when I left Japan last Sept. our furniture had not yet arrived.  So when Chris got home from our Corsica trip he had the task of receiving our stuff and organizing our Japan house.  He did a great job and it’s been fun to see everything here.  It certainly feels like home now.  My job while I’m here is to pick up where Chris left off and finish getting things organized.  Should be fun.