Well, I'm here!!

The trip over was good--Mayland and Alex were kind enough (and heading over to Vancouver anyway-enough) to take me to the airport so we took the ferry over and then they dropped me at the airport.

I checked in via the new-that-day computer terminal which was pretty cool and managed to score myself an aisle seat with the 2 seats beside it empty, in the hopes that they would stay empty, which, indeed, they did--as I was waiting to board (taking advantage of the free wifi at YVR) I heard the little pre-flight flight attendant pow wow and they were saying we were quite empty going over...so it went aisle, me, seat, seat, ri-man, aisle, which was pretty good-I took full sprawling advantage of having two seats, though he never went over the barrier of his 'paid-for' seat...strange.

Got to Narita and from the time we got to the gate to when I had my bus ticket it took about 22 minutes, pretty great--my bags were nearly first off, the immigrations took about 12 seconds ("What are you doing here?" "Visiting my uncle that lives here." "OK" stamp) and the finger printing and photo-taking was quick (and inkless) as well. The worst part was trying to find a pay phone to let Peter know what bus I was on.

The next day I was pretty jet-lagged so woke up at 5. I (mostly) unpacked and then talked to A for awhile, and basically chilled before Peter and I went out in the afternoon. We went to visit Mibu and met her new dog, a French bulldog named Marley who is soooo cute!! He's nearly 3 months old, and quite the character! After that, Peter was after burgers, so Mibu suggested a cute place off Cat Street where we went called something like 'Great Burger' it was very funky, had good (great, even) burgers, and two mascot French bulldogs that were much more 'bulldog' than Marley is so far.

Then we wandered around Cat Street to Omotesando Dori, checked out the new Chanel store (very cool digital signage) and the MoMA store (soooo cool!!) in the samw building. They also have a cool keitai program within the building where you touch your keitai (if it has FeLiCa) onto a sensor and for every Y you spend, you get a point, and then 2x a year, they add up all the points and somehow convert it into a donation to Doctors Without Borders.

Then a pretty chill night at home and I fell asleep at like 9..ooops! Was up at 6 today, but I'll blog that later--off to work now
xoxo
D