Flying to Japan

San Francisco - Vancouver - Tokyo, July 31st - August 2nd

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.

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.

On the Ginza line train, August 2nd

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. 

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.

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.

From the Temple of Heaven to the sky

May 17th, 2015 (written 10 days later)

Just as we'd finished checking out, Howard turned up at the hotel to collect us and put our luggage in his car. For our sakes, he was sacrificing a whole Sunday, instead of spending that day with his wife, in-laws and baby son. We were grateful to him. This was a sultry morning with heavy rain threatening and smog in the air, so it's just as well he was able to drive us to a spot quite close to the attraction we were going to visit: the famous Temple of Heaven, a UNESCO heritage site, southeast of the city centre.

Having squeezed his car into a parking spot on the Xiangchun Hutong, Howard led us with confidence across the busy road to the North Gate of the Temple of Heaven park, generously paying for our entrance tickets himself. He has brought foreign visitors here before. Immediately within the park we noticed groups of people in fours, playing games of Chinese shuttlecock (jiànzi) on the tree lined pathway.

The replica––I've just read on Wikipedia that the original was struck by lightning and burned down in 1889––15th century Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is a huge, triple roofed, circular building with marble terraces around it in concentric circles, steps leading up them on all sides. It's hard to get a photo showing the scale of the site, especially with all those people in the way. The best ploy might be to arrive at 8am, just as the gates open. I was curious to peer inside this building, as Howard said, the equivalent of a cathedral, but it was difficult to catch more than a glimpse of what was beyond the barrier with people pushing in from behind with their cameras. In the interior stood richly patterned pillars, and the domed ceiling was covered with coloured images of dragons (long, 龙) and phoenixes (fenghuang, 凤凰), representing the Yin and Yang. In China, the dragon is a symbol of good fortune, strength and wisdom, not of evil. I think there were stone buffalos in the shadows too; I couldn't be sure.

Wikipedia photo of the Hall of Prayer and outlying halls

A tourist making fun of the Heavenly Stone

South of the Hall of Prayer (the largest structure) is a smaller one, with an echoing wall, The Imperial Vault of Heaven, and lined up with that, further south, is the open air Circular Mound Altar, built in 1530, where they used to worship at the winter solstice, again built in concentric circles with balustrades and flights of marble steps, nine at a time, the nines (as it says on the nearby plaque) "symbolizing the nine layers of Heaven and Emphasizing its extreme importance" (sic). At the centre was the Heavenly Centre Stone, surrounded by nine rings of lesser stones, 18 in the second ring, 81 in the ninth, etc. ... As Howard told us, and as the Wikipedia article explains:

The centre of the altar is a round slate called the Heart of Heaven(天心石) or the Supreme Yang(太阳石), where the Emperor prayed for favourable weather. Thanks to the design of the altar, the sound of the prayer will be reflected by the guardrail, creating significant resonance, which was supposed to help the prayer communicate with the Heaven. 

While we were there, people were irreverently posing for photos on it.

The temple complex is too huge to discover everything in one morning. It includes, for example, the Hall of Divine Music Administration on the western side of the park. What was that? I wondered. We could have explored the paths through this park for hours more. What we did find on the way back to the car was the loveliest méi gùi yuan, rose garden, that I ever saw in China. Such magnificence!

I had to be torn away from there and from the strange birds with their black heads, long tails and blue feathers––which I now think was an azure-winged magpie––and the tiny, tame Chinese marmot in the grass, to be driven to the airport for our flight back to Canada. It only took us about an hour to reach the airport area from the city this time, as the traffic on the main roads was flowing well, that Sunday lunchtime. Howard lives near the airport, he told us, so he knew the way to a restaurant in a modern residential area where he chose a variety of dishes for our substantial lunch at a quiet table. We didn't recognise much of what we were eating, Chris reminds me (though I seem to remember spring rolls, mushrooms, bok choy, flavoured carrots and meats?) but we left well satisfied.

Chris puts his Tilley hat away at the airport

Flight AC32 being prepared for departure

We said goodbye and thanks to Howard at the International Departures drop-off. Then came the long check-in procedures, exit card handover, passport and boarding pass controls, security checks, the wait for our flight to board and the long, long flight itself. We had a good 40 minutes' wait in our seats on the plane, in row 50 again, before ground control gave our pilot push back permission, so our take-off was delayed, and we presumed we wouldn't catch our connecting flight in Toronto. We had intermittent turbulence all the way. I must put it on record that Chris behaved himself remarkably well on this journey, not losing patience once. We each nodded off for about an hour en route; I even had a dream that, near the Arctic waters, the pilot brought the plane down almost to water level so that we were flying among the fishing boats in a harbour, under a bridge and through a hangar, a manoeuvre that knocked off some of the landing gear and fuselage and left cables dangling. We'll never be able to land safely in this state, I thought, as we headed (in my dream, not in reality) towards the mountains of British Columbia ... then something woke me up again, and I went back to watching Gone With The Wind.

It was over 13 hours again before we touched down at Lester Pearson airport, for a long queue in the Immigration Hall (though luckily we were put in a priority line for passengers with connections), then a frantic dash through the baggage collection hall, up and down the steps and the corridors to re-drop our suitcase and be issued twice with new boarding cards: after being told we'd be on a later than planned flight to Ottawa, the original flight turned out to be delayed so we could make the connection after all, but only just. "Paging passengers Christopher Hobbs and Alison Hobbs ...!" During the security checks at Domestic Departures I was of course chosen for the random body search; once released from there we all but ran to our gate. This sort of thing is very stressful for people with erratic pulses. Our last flight of the day in the Canadian sunset was smooth and quick and easy though, and the taxi ride home through peaceful little Ottawa a real pleasure. As we could see in the lamplight, my green garden plants had sprung up beyond recognition during our week away.

Finally we lay down in our own bed. It had been a 28 hour day.

Written over the Mongolian desert

Although there was no Gmail access, no Facebook access, no Google Search opportunity and no Blogger access while we were in Beijing, because of China's Internet censorship, I did take notes so that I could publish this series of blogposts later.

Mid-flight on the Boeing 777

I wrote this first one in the middle of our flight from Toronto to China, in the sort of situation where you look longingly at the standing area near the toilets and think what a good place it would make for a bed if the other people would only get out of the way and allow you to lie flat there.

May 8th-9th, 2015

We'd had breakfast at Zak's in Ottawa's Byward Market to fortify us for the long haul. Our first flight, to Toronto, was very short, and after it we walked across to the "Enhanced Seating" in the International Departures Lounge for some sandwiches. "Enhanced" means that the counters by the bar stools all have iPads available for playing with, not such a good idea; their batteries were nearly dead, so few people were using them. Our Air Canada flight was announced as san shi yi, Mandarin for 31, which made us aware that nearly all our fellow passengers were Chinese. Even the non-Asian members of the flight crew had a smattering of the language so that they could keep their charges in order. The man announcing our boarding procedures sounded like an auctioneer selling sheep.

We had paid for an enhanced seat in the plane too, in the exit row which gave Chris lots of legroom, to his relief, but no usable window. A window is irrelevant anyhow since all windows are kept tightly sealed throughout Air Canada flights, nowadays. It is like sitting in a dark tunnel for 13 hours. We had the pull-out trays and screens which meant unmovable armrests. Half way across the Arctic near the North Pole our second meal of the flight was served––pot noodles with a pair of chopsticks and a spam and salad-cream sandwich, specially chosen for the clientele, I presume. I had green tea with mine. During most of the flight I kept myself sane by watching my choice of videos on the miniature DVD player I'd brought along: Quartet, starring Maggie Smith, Monsieur Ibrahim et les Fleurs du Koran, starring Omar Sherif, and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness with Ingrid Bergman as the young missionary to China. I also started reading a funny and original novel, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared, by Jonas Jonasson, a Swede. Chris spent his time listening to podcasts and a recording of Schubert's Schöne Müllerin song cycle, lyrically performed by Olaf Bär. For one or two of those songs, we shared his headset, which is a very intimate thing to do, in the circumstances.

There's a wonderful Chinese baby in the bulkhead row near us, like a little mandarin with a fuzzy round head and admirably patient parents. I feel comfortable with the Chinese.

At 2am Ottawa time / 2pm Beijing time the pink lights came on in the cabin indicating it was time for us to wake up now. But we hadn't been asleep.