It's been a long day/night

I left Cody and Seychelle's house a little after nine in the morning and arrived at my hotel a little after 4 in the morning... the next morning.

So I might be just a little tiny bit tired.

It was a pretty smooth trip. Including the flight - very little turbulence! Except, of course, when I tried to take a little nap. 

Getting through Japan's customs was super fast - they had a whole bunch of kiosks open and they were just blasting through. You fill out two cards, one basically promising not to overstay your welcome and the other promising you didn't bring in a bunch of expensive personal use stuff, they look at those for approximately half a second and wave you through.

Actually finding where anything is once you get past that part? Slightly more difficult. They have signs for everything in English, so once you know where you're going it's super easy to get there, but their airport is less hand-holdy than the Vancouver one. I needed to find the JR Rail office to exchange my voucher for my pass, and I couldn't see any signs for it! So I just wandered around until I found an airport map and realized it was on the next floor down, the floor where all the signs labelled "TRAINS" were.

Which, yes, is probably logical, but in my defence it had been a long flight.

The JR Rail lady was super nice and helpful, and she gave me a map to the Tokyo subway as well as the JR Rail lines and told me how to get to the area my hotel was in and booked me into the Narita Express. Got onto the Narita Express and was very happy to discover that unlike the Vancouver Skytrain, it did not smell like pee. Neither did the train I eventually managed to catch from the Tokyo hub to my hotel. Score one for Tokyo already.

Another thing that I think is genuinely amazing is that every women's bathroom stall I've seen so far (admittedly not many) has a fold-down baby seat. Not just a little tray you can put baby on and hope it doesn't roll off - an actual seat that will hold your squirmy infant or toddler in place, designed like a high chair. Everywhere should have those. They take up almost no space when folded!

I don't have too many pictures because by the time I got out of the airport (6:30ish local time), it was already pitch dark outside, so I'll just share a couple from the flight.

First view of Japan!

Neat fields and lumpy hills.

Also, my attempt to push my sleep schedule later seems to have been pretty effective! I only napped for maybe a half hour total on the plane, but I'm going to bed at 10pm Japan time, AKA 6am home time, so hopefully I feel okay tomorrow.

We'll find out. Sorry first post is boring! Mostly it's just "my flight didn't crash and I didn't get lost in a foreign country."