Sorry for the late start. It’s been a bit hectic. My first travel day took me 24+ hours to get to my hotel and, as you’d expect, I wasn’t 100% towards the end of that. Up at 4AM, on the shuttle at 4:30AM, on the first plane from PDX to SEA at 7AM, 4H layover plus lots of walking to other terminals, 11H flight to HND, 3+H layover, and then the final flight from HND to KOJ (basically a few hours from Kagoshima).

The longest flight wasn’t that bad. New plane but it had a bunch of glitches. We were delayed because the satellite uplink for the WiFi wasn’t working and I don’t think it ever really worked. The movies paused from time to time. My air blower didn’t work. A whole column of seats (not the rows) had their entertainment systems lock up. But for the most part it was fine. I got to watch several foolish movies: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Fast X, F9, Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, and since I didn’t have time for a full fifth movie, part of Central Intelligence (again). 

I was glad to get to Haneda, but there were extra settings on my phone that were necessary to get the internet working and the WiFi there is always janky. That meant the travel forms which were supposed to be completed online to get a QR code didn’t really work at first and I had to fill out one of them on paper. They’re no longer giving the airlines the paper forms because they’re supposed to be a backup, but you know how that all works.

Being AZN, we have to take gifts when going back to the home country. That usually meant having a whole extra suitcase full of gifts we had to cart around. We finally realized we could just mail them from the airport and this time I arrived at a time the post office was open! Unfortunately, Haneda’s three terminals are widely separated buildings with shuttle buses, and I got to tour all of them. My flight arrived at Terminal 3, the post office is in Terminal 1, and my ANA domestic flight was in Terminal 2. It was much easier than last year.

My first actual hiccup was when I couldn’t find the key to the lock on the bag with the presents. Fortunately it was locked through some strings and I just cut the strings. Then I couldn’t find my “Japanese wallet” with all my Japanese money. Fortunately, I had a Suica app with money on it so I used that. (I should mention I’m carrying two phones because I need be logged into two Apple accounts since I had ¥7700 on an old account and that meant I had to have a spare iPhone just to spend it.) I have ways of getting around problems like this and later the next day I found the key and the wallet in a pocket in my bag that’s really hard to see.

Anyway, onto the food. It was about 1:30AM Portland time when I was looking for dinner (4:30PM Japan time) and I wasn’t really feeling like anything heavy. All the flying was making my stomach feel a bit weird too. I found a nice cafe with a view of the runways that had Japanese coffee house fare including Napolitan spaghetti. I can’t tell you how happy spaghetti with a ketchup based sauce made me, but it’s something I like having on every trip.

I got to Kagoshima airport and it was larger than I expected. Booking.com told me that the prepaid cost of a taxi was ¥35,0000 (about $2,000) so I think they have their closest airport marked as Fukuoka or something. When I called the hotel, they told me to pre-book a ride and gave me some numbers but when I called they told me just to get in a cab at the airport.

And that’s about it for the first day.