I'm writing this post from Tokyo, which marks my first time leaving the continent of North America. I suppose that has a symbolic meaning, even though I won't see any of Japan except the Tokyo airport. (On the bright side, I will have two years to see other parts of Asia, and I will not see Godzilla). As far as that goes, airports are airports. I haven't seen many continents, but I have seen a whole lot of airports. The Tokyo airport is not a whole lot different from some of the other ones I've been to. Reading the screens to find my connecting flight is slower, because most of the time, the display is in Japanese. They flash to English occasionally, but not for very long. Normally, it's fairly easy to figure out which city is which in a foreign language, but in a language that uses an entirely different alphabet, there's not a lot I can do with it. Even with their extremely preferential handicapped policy*, security is quicker, because either their scanners or their people who read the scanners are much better.
Oh, and the wireless in this airport absolutely sucks, even by the standards of wireless internet, which rarely fails to make me appreciate wires. They make you load eight different pages--at pre-terms-of-use free internet speed (meaning it takes an average of two tries per page)--just to get on. Then after that, they say you're connected, but pages don't load. And that's why I didn't actually get to post this thing until I got to Singapore.
*Any time a person in a wheelchair shows up in line, that person (and everyone he or she is traveling with) automatically gets moved to the front of the line. I know I'm a bad person (and irrational), but I got to the point where I was really annoyed to see yet another wheelchair. Wheelchairs or not, though, it was still quicker than getting through a comparable line in the US, especially when you take into account that they always search my bag in the US.
No comments:
Post a Comment