01.10.05: in the air

In the morning I leave my subtropical Manhattanish paradise with a bit of regret and go to check lap cock. I mean Chek Lap Kok, the Hong Kong airport. My flight is Korean Air, through Seoul.

The airport is quite nice.

Amazing discovery number one: the Hong Kong-Seoul and Seoul-Tokyo flights use big planes (Boeing 747-400?) and not small ones like they use for flights inside Europe.

Amazing discovery number two: Korean Air feeds people real food that does not taste like airplane food. They had something that looked like a rather big smoked salmon salad, and you add rice and some sauce and seaweed to it and mix. Of course I needed the advice of the woman next to me to figure out how to eat it, but it was good.

Seoul airport must be the most confusing airport ever.

Tokyo is a sea of lights, not as intense as Hong Kong but endless.

We arrive more than an hour late, and I also get searched for the first time after leaving Russia. They only want to search the suitcase. Luckily they don't open my backpack, where the first thing they'd see would have been The Rape of Nanking.

In spite of the search I make it out of the airport in 25 minutes after landing, but still miss my train. The next one is 45 minutes later, and turned out to be a local and not an express. It takes forever, and at some point I realize that I might not make it to Nippori where Joy and Krabak are going to meet me before the last train that we are supposed to change to.

After Hong Kong the public transportation in Tokyo is a rude awakening. They don't have any night transportation at all. OTOH, the Hong Kong transportation is serving a very densely populated area of 7 million and Tokyo transportation is serving a much more spread-out populationg of 35 million, so they are doing amazingly well considering the enormity of the task.

When I get upstairs at Nippori I am greeted with screams in Finnish: "Vera, get a ticket, quick! The last train leaves in five minutes!" Joy and Krabak are waving their arms and doing a fairly good imitation of a windmill. I run to the ticket machine, can't figure out how to use it (you are supposed to give it you old ticket in addition to the money, but with the help of Joy and locals I somehow manage, and we run to the train.

Tokyo has an uncountable number of subway lines (literally: you start counting them on a map, in the unlikely event that you have a map that shows them all, and you get confused pretty fast; Wikipedia says there are about 70 lines and 1000 stations) operated by at least 22 different companies. Like in Hong Kong, you pay as you go; unlike in Hong Kong, if you change from line 1 to line 2 and then to line 3, you pay to 3 different companies, and each ticket's price varies according to the distance. (If you buy a cheap ticket and then decide to travel a longer distance than it allows you have to pay the difference before exiting.) To avoid long ticket lines and general despair among citizenry 21 of the companies sell cards called Passnet that work much in the same way as HKL card with value, except that you don't load value on the card but just buy a new card every time the old one runs out. They come in denominations of 1000, 3000 and 5000 yen.

The biggest company of them all, JR East, does not use Passnet but instead has its own card named Suica. It works exactly like HKL card with value and like Octopus card in Hong Kong: you load value on it, use it, load more value. The first one costs 2000 yen of which 500 is deposit and 1500 value.

To alleviate the confusion (I am sure) and further point out differences between Passnet and Suica Passnet has to be fed to the ticket gate and then taken out of it, whereas Suica only has to be shown to it. Still, cards are your friends and make life easier.

Subway and trains and stations are the only places in Japan where you can see any useful information in English or at least in Latin alphabet. Stations have their names written in kanji, hiragana (apparently sometimes katakana but I haven't seen any) and Latin alphabet. Trains have displays that show the name of the next station, which lines you can change to and whether the doors will open on the right or on the left. They also announce it, in both Japanese and English. JR East has the best display of them all, and shows also the estimated arrival time of arrival to every station.

In comparison with the trip from the airport the trip from Nippori to Ookayama is quite short. There is a 10-minute walk from there, and we go to a store to buy some food first. The supermarket - more about it later - is open until one and has a lot of unrecognizable scary foods. I play it safe and buy yellowtail and green tea ice cream.

Japan also has lots of convenience stores open round the clock. They are called AmPm.

The most surprising thing is how small the houses are. I somehow imagined Tokyo to be a city of skyscrapers, much like Hong Kong, but most of the houses are just 2-3-storey high. It figures, Japan being such a seismically unstable place, but I had just never thought about it. Now I understand why they are so short of space.

Joy's and Krabak's apartment is very American in a heartwarming and unexpected way. That is, the inside is American; the outside is a bit more HOAS-style. They have a carpet floor and a fan and bathtub in the shower and even an American-style sink, which is kind of weird because it does not contain an American-style garbage disposer inside. For a second I am afraid that it has The American Problem, too, but no, the plumbing works perfectly well. (We might be a great nation, but a nation of great plumbers we are not.)

We sit on the floor and drink tea (they have the best hot-water device ever, I want one like that too! It heats the water and then keeps it hot.) and talk about life. I still can't believe that I am seeing real live Joy and Krabak.