Wednesday, July 1, 2009

We are finally in Tokyo!

Wynn being such a good girl yesterday
during the ultimately fruitless wait

The sight of a 747 full of people who aren't going anywhere,
getting their hotel vouchers

Finally, at 9:00 this morning, our repaired aircraft pushed back and launched into the sky.
Wynn behaved better than we had expected during the 11-hour flight.

(Wells Fargo employees may recognize
that pony she's strangling.)

She got more solid sleep than either of us - only whined a few times. We arrived in Tokyo at 11:00 AM local time - that would be 9 pm Minnesota time. Arrival and customs was a breeze as there were no other flights arriving at that hour. Given how long we had been running, we thought that Wynn might be groggy at the airport, but...

here she is running laps around the luggage cart while I get money exchanged, train pass set up, hotel bus arranged.

She did finally nod off on the 80-minute bus ride into the city:
But since our arrival at 1:30 PM local time, she's been up and at 'em. They didn't have our room ready (not that we expected them to, check-in starts at 2:00 ... I was thrilled that they actually had our reservation given the events from yesterday), so we waited in the lobby for a while. Wynn was coughing - not surprising after having been in a dry airplane for the past day - but we guess that the sight of half-zombie Westerners in the lobby with a coughing Asian child looked too much like swine flu, so they kindly suggested we wait in a different hotel room until ours was ready. House arrest, whatever.

We'll go into more detail about the hotel later,
but this is our view out the room where we are now established:
It is now 3:40 PM local time - Ann is crashed on the couch, Wynn is busy converting the room into her PlaySpace(TM), and I'm trying to get the Internet to work.

Next order of business is to cross that bridge, find a restaurant that we can figure out and a 7-11 to get supplies from, come back to the hotel room, and sleep.

2 comments:

Ann and Scott said...

About "finding a restaurant we can figure out..."
There's a McD's about two blocks from the hotel; we walked there and discovered that we had NO IDEA how to open the doors to get in. They were automatic, but had no motion sensors; the trick was to tap the handle lightly to make it open. Took a minute or two of loitering and spying on the locals to figure out how to get in.

Anonymous said...

Scott, Ann and Wynn:

We are glad to hear that you are finally there. The pictures are wonderful to see. We know the location that you have switched to, but not the name of the new hotel. Hopefully you will be able to do all that you planned to walk to at the former location. We are getting along famously with Shadow. Instead of running away from me, now he sits on my lap and follows me around. Give Wynn a hug from us.

Mom