Welcome to the first in a bunch of travelogue entries about our recent trip to Japan. If you don’t want the nitty gritty details, skip these and wait for my big cost analysis. I won’t be discussing prices at all during these entries, so if you want, take a guess at how much we spent and we’ll see how close you came later!
Day 1: New York Day 2: Japan Airlines first class Day 3: Kyoto Day 4: Kyoto Day 5: Osaka Day 6: Nara Day 7: Nara Day 8: Tokyo Day 9: Tokyo Day 10: Tokyo
Day 11: Flight back to New York
Day 1: New York
Employing a strategy we used on our trip to Peru, we planned to do laundry in the middle of our stay in Japan, meaning we could pack half as many clothes as we needed and wear everything twice. That means Marge and I both got by with just a carry-on backpack! Using the rolling technique, I fit some long-sleeve shirts, a bunch of t-shirts, shorts, a pair of pants, boxers with dogs on them, two umbrellas and sneakers. Not to mention a few books, a tablet, a camera, laundry detergent, medicine and other travel necessities.
Our flight was to leave on a Sunday afternoon from JFK. But since we had a free hotel night to burn, and the trip from Albany all the way to JFK in order to make a flight is always unappealing, we decided to go to New York on Saturday and stay overnight.
Conrad Lobby
Whenever I have a free hotel night, I try to use it at the most expensive hotel possible. I had a free Hilton night from some credit card or another, so we booked a night at the Conrad near Tribeca and the WTC site.
The room was pretty ridiculous by New York standards. It had a separate sitting room stocked with arty books about NYC. I was tempted to leave my copy of David Lee Roth’s Crazy From The Heat in amongst them, but it was the only reading material I brought with me.
We spent Saturday walking around Battery Park, Brookfield Place, the new Irish Potato Famine Memorial, and the free Museum of the American Indian at the old customs house. We also stumbled on the 9/11 site.
Can I tell you a story about the 9/11 site? The first time Marge and I stumbled on it, it was probably less than a year after the attack. Since I was a lost college kid, I had no idea what neighborhood we were in. So when I saw those big huge pits in the ground, I said “Look at all this prime real estate! Why hasn’t anyone built something here??” Then I saw a bunch of those Missing Person flyers, put two and two together and immediately felt bad.
Since food is so expensive in NYC, we got some takeout from Whole Foods, which was not cheap either, and brought it back to the Conrad. Watched Miley Cyrus host Saturday Night Live just a few blocks away, and tucked in for a good night’s sleep.
Day 2: Japan Airlines First Class
Took the blue subway line to Howards Beach, then the Airtrain and moseyed on down to JFK for a 1:00 PM flight. After collecting American Airlines miles for years, we had enough to fly first class on their One World partner, Japan Airlines. (Actually, we have enough miles to do this a few more times…) So we made sure to get to the airport early to take advantage of the first class lounge and the free food (left). Then it was off to the sky!
We’ve flown business class overseas before, but this was our first time in real, honest-to-god First Class. Not business class, not scum class. Now I know what aristocrats feel like. Japan Airlines has something called the SkySuite, which basically means your (fake) leather seat is inside its own little box, so you don’t even have to see the other people in first class.
First class seat. That is Margie’s on the left
Your every need is attended to, before you’re even aware that you have a need. Hot towels are brought. Champagne is served. That seat folds down into a flat bed which the nannies (flight attendants) put a mattress pad on top of while you’re brushing your teeth.
And the food. Oh god, the food!
Peep the NY Times Magazine with the Mark Leibovich piece on Donald Trump
You’re given a choice of American or Japanese meal. Of course, we went with Japanese. There were so many courses. I took so many photos, but I won’t post them all. You’re just going to have to trust me that this food was all unique, delicious, and not very weird.
This was one suspicion I had about Japan that turned out to be false: That their food would be weird, even for me. You know, all those pickled things, daikon radishes, sweet bean paste and soybeans everywhere. But everything was relatively familiar.
Then there are the amenity kits filled with toothpaste, toothbrushes, lotions, cologne, and on and on. They even give you your own set of luxurious Japan Airlines branded pajamas! I’m wearing them as I type this!
So needless to say, this was a great way to spend a 14 hour flight. I promised I wouldn’t talk about costs until the end, but let’s just say that, all in, the first class flights cost many airlines miles, but close to zero dollars.
The nannies (again, flight attendants) were so extremely nice. Marge felt bad ever saying no to them. So when they tried to give us two customs forms, and Marge said we only needed one since we were married, the nannies assumed that, since we had different last names, we must be newly married and this must be our honeymoon! Not true, but Marge didn’t say they were wrong.
So now the nannies were all a-titter that they had honeymooners in the first row! Then at the end of the flight, they gave us postcard with a self-portrait and a gift bag filled basically with all of the leftover snacks from the flight, and two Japan Airline mugs!
As far as lies of omission go, this is pretty harmless, right?
We got into Narita Airport around 4PM Tokyo time, which to us felt like 2AM. But we had to keep pushing! I front-loaded the transportation on this trip. By going out to Kyoto on our arrival, we could spend the rest of our trip leisurely backtracking to Tokyo.
We validated our Japan Rail Pass at the airport and the helpful Japan Rail clerk directed us to which trains we needed to get on first for Tokyo’s Shinagawa station and then on to Kyoto. He even reserved seats for us. The Japan Rail Pass was super handy because instead of going through the turnstile, you just flash your card to the attendant on the way into and out of a station.
As I mentioned before, the trains in Japan are perfect since they actually invest in their infrastructure. We eventually got to Kyoto around 9PM their time, or 7AM our time. Those nice train passes couldn’t help us once we reached Kyoto though, and we couldn’t buy a subway ticket. Japan Rail passes are not good on the subways that we needed, and we wandered all around looking for an ATM since we couldn’t buy a subway ticket with a credit card.
It was frustrating because we came so close, but seemed so far! We traveled almost 7,000 miles from New York, and now we were stuck just a few miles from our bed because we didn’t have any yen! No ATMs were taking my bank card, so we ended up hoofing it to our AirB&B, called Nodoka-an.
It wasn’t a terrible walk, but three miles is longer than I would’ve liked to walk after being up for 24 hours, not including a half-hour of bad airplane sleep. But finally we were home, actually further from real home than I’ve ever been in my life, and we had all the Japanese television we could ever need.
Next time, I’ll tell you all about Kyoto and about all the things there are to do in Kyoto, which basically means… temples!