Japan - The Prequel

As you can tell by the previous post Japan Bitches! We were scrambling to get things organized and done. One of the problem with both of us working so much right at the end was that neither of us had much time to organize and coordinate planning a 2 week international trip.

We had some help planning the trip from friends and acquaintances that live in Japan and the JTB travel guides were really quite nice even if we had some communications difficulties due to the language barrier.

Still, I felt just a little ill-prepared going over with the attitude that I’d figure some things out while I was there and that just the way it was going to have to be. I made my g/f promise that she wouldn’t show up at 2:00am the day we were supposed to leave with her hair on fire and completely stressed out. She kept it by showing up at 2:00am without her hair on fire and other than being tired she wasn’t too stressed. It was about 3:00am when we got in bed, leaving about 1.5 hours to sleep before we had to get up at 4:30am. I had a private car coming to take us to the airport – I figured we deserved it and I wasn’t about to try to mooch a ride to the airport off of someone at 5:30am.

My g/f was going over to Japan initially for work so we met her father at the airport in the Admiral’s club (international travel in business class gets access!) and sort of chilled in a zombie-like state until it was time for our flights. I showed my g/f a 747 and we talked about them for a while – little did we know this would foreshadow for what was to come.

We also jumped on the Internet kiosks and made an effort to reserve our ski and snowboard gear once we got to Niseko. Working with the Japanese web sites can be fairly difficult because it’s a mixture of Japanese and really fucked up “Engrish.” We were pretty sure we got our reservations made, but they had to confirm them so all we could do now was wait.

Unfortunately, in making the reservations my g/f had taken her little tiny bag that holds her credit cards and driver’s license up to the kiosk. The bag is black, the countertops are black – you can see where this is going and we realized she had left them behind once we landed in LA. Not much we could do about it at that point so she started calling to cancel her cc’s prior to the next flight. I told her not to sweat it and that I still had my cc’s and plenty of cash.

And finally, we were on our way…..