This was the luxury stretch! One snag though: due to someone's incompetence at the San Francisco airport, my suitcase went missing for five days; it was not so luxurious to manage without a proper change of clothes for that length of time.
Immigration in Tokyo was very quick and efficient, but again, the fruitless wait for my suitcase at the carousel. It took an extra hour before we could set off from the airport after helping a novice but sincere and courteous baggage-handling girl fill in the online forms about the shape, size, colour and contents of my case. I used vocabulary she didn't know and she had to get assistance from her superiors. The Japanese take enormous care not to give offence, which I appreciate, and I was given another little amenities kit as a compensatory gift from the airline. Then after clearing customs we had a longish conversation with the man in the railway office who sold us (for cash only, N.B.) our return tickets + extra metro tickets to central Tokyo. It cost us almost 10,000 yen which seems exhorbitant, until you remember that $1 (Canadian) = about 80 yen. We had to change from the Keisei express ("Skyliner") train to the Ginza Line metro at Ueno, not as difficult as I'd feared, but we were tired and hot and didn't know which "gate" to aim for at Mitsukoshimae (三越前) station, our metro stop. It should have been A10; we emerged at one of the other exits and had to use the GPS on Chris' phone, as in the Californian forests, to find our destination. The Mitsui Garden Hotel Nihonbashi Premier was actually not so far off, opposite two enormous skyscrapers, one of which was going to be Chris' place of work. The other (the Nihonbashi-Mitsui Tower, 34 storeys high) was floodlit after dark in the Olympic colours, next year's big event being much on the minds of Tokyo's authorities, obviously; they are getting ready for it already.
The Mitsui Garden Hotel's reception desk is on the 9th floor and our room was on the 12th. In a corner of the lifts are survival kits in case you have the misfortune to get stuck there during an earthquake *. The receptionist, bowing politely, looked askance when we told him we had a booking for 10 nights. I wondered why he felt so sorry for us. The room was in fact pretty small and all the furniture and walls were black, which looked chic, but made it seem smaller. Outside our window was another high wall to look at. There was very little space for our things and no desk, but the bed was comfortable, and during our stay Chris was able to work on his laptop at a small glass table. The pull-out washing line in the shower was useful, my change of clothes being so limited, although the humidity was such that it took a good two days for washed socks to dry, even after rolling them in the towels.
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| Approaching Vancouver |
Anyway, apart from that, we had seats near the front again for the evening ride from SFO to YVR (Vancouver) going parallel to the coast, and I in a window seat, which gave me extraordinary views to the east of the semi-dessert terrain in northern California and then of the still snow-capped, isolated mountains of the coastal range in Oregon, their peaks glowing in the semi-light after sunset. This was unworldly scenery. As we descended into the Vancouver area too, my views of the lit up city, the ships anchored in English Bay and the mountains beyond were exciting.
It was in Vancouver that we realised my suitcase, despite its red "priority" label, was not going to show up. Before we could catch a shuttle bus to our hotel for the night, we had to wait at the carousel in vain and then report it, taking a long time.
The name of the hotel (on Cessna Drive) was The Pacific Gateway, appropriately, but we shall probably not return there; the room was over-priced. Before tackling the Pacific on August 1st, we managed to find a walk along a trail along a bank of the Fraser River, where sweet, fresh blackberries, straight from the bush, supplemented our hotel breakfast; it felt good to get some fresh air, knowing we had a 9-10 hour flight ahead of us: AC3.
Signature Class, what self-indulgent snobbery it encourages! The Maple Leaf Lounge was full, but was serving plenty of snacks and drinks at its lunch buffet, so we didn't need to line up at an airport Tim Horton's. Priority boarding for that full flight made the departure more tolerable too. I was right to anticipate that the luxury would spoil us on flight AC3; little details make a difference, the deferential "Would you like a glass of champagne, Mrs. Hobbs?" as you settle in to your little den with the comfy bedding and shelf space in the Dreamliner, while trying to work out what all the knobs and switches do to your seat, the complimentary "amenity kits" with their eye shades and black socks, the stainless steel rather than plastic cutlery for your in-flight meals, and the large, clear, modern screen for the map and movies, the noise cancelling headphones. I thoroughly enjoyed wallowing in the novelty of it, although I'm old enough to remember when the standard of Economy Class service on long haul flights used to be quite similar. The map showed a straight line between Vancouver and Tokyo, across the Aleutian Islands. For entertainment I watched two comedy films, learning a good deal about men in the process. 25 Km/H, in German, was about a pair of brothers who decided to fulfil a teenage dream of riding across Germany on their mopeds, each coming to terms with his very male mid-life crisis in the process, and the other was that northern British-humoured comedy about six unemployed men and a boy --- The Full Monty --- starring Robert Carlyle, who also acts the no-good father in Angela's Ashes, a film I happened to watch later on during this trip as well.
In an aisle seat with the cabin windows tinted in changing colours to conceal the view, I saw nothing of the ocean we were flying over. I did succeed in lying flat and getting some sleep, about two hours worth. When we landed at Tokyo it was mid-afternoon on August 2nd.
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| On the Ginza line train, August 2nd |
The Mitsui Garden Hotel's reception desk is on the 9th floor and our room was on the 12th. In a corner of the lifts are survival kits in case you have the misfortune to get stuck there during an earthquake *. The receptionist, bowing politely, looked askance when we told him we had a booking for 10 nights. I wondered why he felt so sorry for us. The room was in fact pretty small and all the furniture and walls were black, which looked chic, but made it seem smaller. Outside our window was another high wall to look at. There was very little space for our things and no desk, but the bed was comfortable, and during our stay Chris was able to work on his laptop at a small glass table. The pull-out washing line in the shower was useful, my change of clothes being so limited, although the humidity was such that it took a good two days for washed socks to dry, even after rolling them in the towels.
We arrived Friday. My suitcase finally reached me the following Tuesday evening.
Too befuddled to search far for supper on that first night, we found a narrow Vietnamese eatery hung with pretty lanterns in a nearby side street and enjoyed some comfort food there, perching on high stools. Cash only, once more. It was already dark.
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| Mitsui Tower, Chuo Ciy, Tokyo |
*As far as I could tell from the pictures, the emergency kit contains food and drink, a portable toilet, a first aid kit, a set of dominoes to play with, a blanket and a fan.
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