unexpected detour to tokyo

I have never been so happy about a delayed flight. I am in Japan for the night!! The flight to Taipei was delayed overnight, so Delta arranged for accommodations, transportation and food for the inconvenienced passengers. I'm at the Garden Hotel in Narita, and could not be happier with this development.

Aboard the bus taking us stranded passengers to the Garden Hotel Narita. 

Mutsy (my stuffed dog) on my bed in my hotel room. Yes, I brought my stuffed animal with me.

My hotel room. Very space-conscious. I really like it. 

Dinner! Well, part of it. On this plate we have acorn squash slice (I think), roast beef, tiramisu, tofu, sauteed shrimp and whole fish (anchovies??), and lychee (the brown strawberry-looking thing in the middle), which was a really confusing thing to eat. You peel off the outside and eat the fruit, which is jell-like and wet like watermelon. It is also sweet and delicious and apparently also in Taiwan.

Stuff in the convenience store! :D

 Outside the convenience store was a little toy machine, so of course I had to use one of my new 100-yen pieces to get something!

I got... weird little ball...things. I think they go on your phone. Well, I got 'em in Japan, so I don't really care what they are.

Cup noodles and some kind of milk coffee...thing. It'll be breakfast tomorrow.

The actual 13 hour flight from Detroit to Narita was uneventful. I wrote a very long post mid-way through:


"I'm 10,000 feet in the air and I think I can feel myself getting jet lag already. Not only will it be 3:30am Caitlin's-old-timezone time when I arrive in Tokyo, but the lights on the plane are turned down and everyone has their windows closed so they can sleep, so even though it's still light outside (and technically still daytime, even in my own timezone) it feels like night in here.


Basically, I have no idea when I should feel tired.


This plane has movies playing to keep us occupied; four total on this flight. The first was The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which was a British film and both touching and artfully, subtly amusing, as British films tend to be. I loved it. The next (which is on now) is Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. After that is We Bought a Zoo, which I want to see, and Moneyball, which I also want to see but will likely sleep through because I'll be exhausted by that time. Therefore, since I probably won't sleep much on the 1hr flight from Tokyo to Taiwan, I'll probably get a grand total of 4 hours sleep tonight.


Fortunately I'll be going to my hotel once I arrive in Taiwan, so I'll be exhausted enough to sleep right through the night on their time and then wake up alert-ish Friday morning so I can go do whatever they need me to do.


So far there hasn't been anything noteworthy about my trip to share, except that my sister was right about the Willy-Wonka tunnel in Detroit's international airport. I found my gate all right, as well as the currency exchange counter. I now have 1500 Japanese yen and way more New Taiwan dollars than one person should be carrying around at one time. I don't need the yen, exactly, and I won't be in Japan itself, I'll be in the international airport terminal, but I will be in Japan gosh darn it, so I'm going to buy something  (be it food or Hello Kitty stickers) with their money in their country.


On a side note, when I can't look out the window and see how far up I am, I really enjoy the sensation of turbulance. The shaking, the occasional lightness in my stomach as the plane drops a bit. On a rollercoaster my reaction is "get me out of here now," mostly because it's so fast, but in a car or on a plane I think it's relaxing.


Also, I wish there was a track in here for me to jog on, or at least a more circular walkway. It used to be that when I stood up on a plane, my legs tingled from lack of use. Now when I stand up and walk, I get this sense of excitement from my body, like, "Oh, are we going to go jogging? Please say we're going to exercise! :D" My muscles are a bunch of endorphin addicts.


I took a trip to the lavatory a while ago and honest-to-God spent a few minutes jamming to my iPod in there. I really needed to move around profusely for a bit. I might get up and go for another walk, even though it's difficult to do so in tight spaces where the only places to walk are up the long aisle and then back down it.


Whelp, the Journey 2: The Mysterious Island movie is over, so hopefully they'll be starting We Bought A Zoo soon! Toodles!


LATER:


We Bought a Zoo made me cry for the entire last half. I was on the verge of tears through most of it, but I gave in at the part where *this censored for spoilers* and was teary-eyed the whole rest of it.


After that I tried to sleep and found that there is no such thing as a comfortable position on a plane when you are riding coach and are not next to the window. I basically gave up on sleep, resigned myself to being exhausted when I got to Taiwan, and am going to alternate between majong on my computer, and listening to music and/or studying Mandarin on my iPod.


At least I have an aisle seat, so I don't feel closed in. Occupying the three other seats are a mother and her daughter, the daughter being about 5 or 6 years old. The little girl is sleeping in the two middle seats, and she's really cute. She reminds me of my 4-year-old neice, although to be fair the fact that I have a 4-year-old (and a 1-year-old) neice at all means that all small children remind me of them.


Well, off to play majong. The nice thing about not being able to use my phone on the plane is that I have absolutely no idea how long I've been on this flight, but by counting down the movies (three down, one to go) I can estimate how much time left. Since we're now on the last movie, I'm assuming we're getting relatively close (by a few hours) to the end of the flight."