Before I even arrived at the airport in Saskatoon, good fortune already fell upon me. A mishap at the drive-through caused a 10-pack of Timbits that Andrea had bought for the kids to fall onto the ground. Without missing a beat, the woman at the drive-through insisted it was no problem and that she’d get us another pack. I jumped out of the car and found the box, unopened, on the ground. When we offered to give back the replacement pack, they told us to keep both. That’s how I scored a 10-pack of donut holes for my flight. Things are looking up.
I’ve landed in Calgary and am about to board. Sitting in the terminal, I’ve been people-watching and thinking about how many people are glued to their phones. I’m not much of one to talk – typing away at my MacBook – but I do like to talk to strangers.
Anyway, at the very end of my first flight, I struck up a conversation with my seat-mate, who is going to Tokyo to climb Mt. Fuji. She’s also going to visit some of the parks around Sapporo. That’s the danger of chatting with strangers: FOMO sets in quickly. Should I also be planning a climb of Fujisan? It’s not in the cards for this trip.
On the main flight, I sat next to what appeared to be the only baby on this nine-hour transpacific flight. Luckily, he was a champ, sleeping most of the way and lighting up the cabin when he woke. He’d already flown four hours from Toronto earlier that day. His parents were kind, and we chatted about our travel plans as well as our kids. I’ll say it again: chatting with strangers is one of the things I love about travelling.
Getting from the plane to my hotel bed was next. My friends had warned me that while tap payments do exist in Japan, they’re far from ubiquitous. I ran into trouble paying train and subway fares without resorting to credit cards in the wrong currency. The roughly $2 CAD subway fee derailed (pardon the pun) my trip home for nearly 20 minutes while I figured out how to pay, because the machine wouldn’t take anything but cash or a metro card. I finally bought a reusable “unlimited” 72-hour subway card online, then used a QR code to get the machine to print it for me.
When I finally arrived, I turned on some Japanese TV and found the shows exciting and bizarre: game shows, news, and something resembling America’s Funniest Home Videos, but with picture-in-picture shots of guests predicting what would happen next. Considering the ups and downs of the journey, it was a pretty fortunate day – much better than the one those featured on the show were having.
- I don’t know what the show was called, but it’s a missed opportunity if they never titled it “Ow, My Balls.”[↩]