Days 4-5. Sunday Sept 5 and Monday Sept 6

Jet-lag confusion!!!!!!!!!!!

Here I am, sitting on Chiba (a suburb that people include in the 34 million population of Tokyo,) at 6:20 am on Tuesday, September 7.  In Madison right now, it is still Monday, 4:20 pm to be exact.  For some reason, this is endlessly confusing to me.  Hopefully it is because I just got here, was tired and and just have to acclimate myself.

After my last post, we got on the plane, AA flight 169 and got our first class seats.  My first experience with those on an international flight, and it was Awesome!!! We were definitely spoiled on the flight.  We had like a seven course meal, I am not joking. Bread service, then grilled chilled shrimp, then salad, then a steak, then a sundae for dessert.  Then up in front they put out snacks and sweets in case you were hungry before they fed you again.  Toward the end of the flight they served another meal but I was sleeping and full so I only ate the fresh fruit and just baked cookie.  We left LAX at 12:15pm on Sunday and arrived at NRT on Monday at right around 3:30pm.  The actual flight time was just under 11 hours.  It didn't seem that long with seats that transformed into beds and the on demand video screen... I watched Date Night, five 30 Rock episodes and played some Tetris.

The plan when we got to Narita was to take the long journey through Customs, after which we would collect our baggage, then get in the Immigration line, and finally find our way to the rental phone counter so we could get the phone I reserved and call Katie, who with her husband Ben, were going to be our couchsurfing hosts while in Japan.  Katie said when they came six months ago this process took them about two hours, so she would meet us in the airport Subway station at about 6pm since our flight was scheduled in at a little after four.  Imagine her surprise when I was calling her at 4:10 telling her our flight was early, we walked right past an empty massive queue to get our fingerprints and picture taken by immigration, down the escalators where our bags were waiting for us and right through customs where the guy barely batted an eye.  He just took our sheet and we were officially in Japan!  Of course, our flight had 97 empty seats on it and if other flights are similarly empty, we picked a great time to come for a visit.

We called Katie and decided we were going to venture to the Chiba station near where she lived on her own since it would take her a while to get to the airport.  We encountered nothing but calm, helpful Japanese people everywhere in the airport.  It wasn't massive, loud disorganized chaos like in the US.  There were people everywhere and even if they didn't know English, they were happy to help.  Matt said he is not use to me being as lost and confused as he usually is.  We have mostly only been places together I am super familiar with.  We pretty much just kept saying "Chiba Station," because that is where we needed to get to and eventually found our way to the Subway where another nice lady zoomed through all the Japanese prompts to get us Subway tickets. 

We met up with Katie and ventured (not too far) to her apartment. She and her husband are from Seattle, Washington and came here six months ago to teach English.  She made us yummy chicken, broccoli and rice for dinner.  I noticed there was no oven, just a stovetop and she said that Japanese people really don't eat food that needs to be baked.  That would never work for me!  Where would I cook all the frozen pizza?!?
I was expecting a little tiny apartment, and it was small, but definitely not as small as I imagined.  We are of course a ways from the shoebox living of downtown Tokyo proper.  At about nine pm I was having trouble keeping my eyes open after the time change and long journey.  We decided to lay down and that's right when Ben got home from work.  We said hello and talked to him for a bit.  He has Wednesday off, so hopefully we can hang out more then.  We went to bed and now I am up bright and early, ready to explore when Matt wakes up.  It is ungodly humid here, like 95 degrees and 100 percent humidity, but it's better then it being winter I suppose. 

After our first few hours here I am excited that we lucked out and got such a great couple to stay with for our first couchsurfing experience and I know we are going to have an awesome next couple of days... Stay Tuned!!!