Back to Japan

There are some disappoints in life. I think writing an entire blog entry and forgetting to save can rank as one of them. In my rush to get out of Sony tonight to get some food, I managed to close out my computer without saving. I'm back in my hotel room rewriting most of what I wrote earlier. It's like taking Ambian and still trying to sleep beside a fat guy that snores enough to make your seat feel like a magic fingers bed in a cheap motel. That about sums up my plane ride.

 I had a chance to be a little more prepared for Tokyo this trip, and one of the things I really wanted to minimize was jet lag. On my previous trip, I stayed up till 10 pm at night and drank a lot of water to stay hydrated. It was somewhat effective, but I had real problems sleeping on the plane. When I got back to the States on my previous trip, I coached soccer on good Friday. Handled Saturday pretty well, but I crashed hard Easter day  because I couldn't sleep the night before. A lot of people suggested taking Ambian to sleep on the plane, and my brother Britt said it really gave him an edge on adjusting in Iraq. I decided on Sunday before my trip, I would simply run to Publix and grab some for my flight on Monday.  After looking at houses I had found on Redfin, we stopped by Publix to provision the family with perishables that had been devoured by the children the previous week. While I was finishing gathering ingredients for the night's meal, Bobby went to the pharmacy section of the store to look for Ambian. The question is how to you categorize something Ambian in the drug section?

When I caught up with Bobby, she was scanning the containers of pharmaceuticals as though she was trying to find the Ark after it was stored in a government warehouse in Indian Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. She was somewhere between cold medicine and laxatives when I asked her if she had found it. "No," she said," I looked all over for it. I don't see it on the shelves." Thank God it wasn't in the laxative section. To my surprise, Ambian is a controlled substance. This was something I should have suspect given that it causes drowsiness, may cause you to sleep walk and suggest against driving while adjusting to the drug.  I quickly called my doctor and explained my situation.  He phoned in a prescription to Walgreens and I picked it up not long after.

What was the best thing packed in my bag this trip? Pictures of the kids, but a definite number two was Captain Crunch.  Those peanut butter morsels will serve me well in the morning when I don't have a stomach for rice and chicken. I also downloaded some cool Android applications to help me navigate my way through Tokyo. My last trip, I figured out that my GPS worked fine on the phone with it in airplane mode, but I didn't have any map data I could use offline. I found two applications to help solve the problem, Mapdroyd and TravelDroyd. I also found a free subway app that is just a copy of a PDF I have on my desktop called Tokyo Subway.  After using Mapdroyd and Traveldroyd this evening, I would suggest Mapdroyd for location mapping and traveldroyd for finding routes. Although Mapdroyd downloads Google map tiles, it does not have routing functionality. I wasn't disappointed because it was a free application, and it gave me enough information to help me figure out where I am. 

Packed and ready to go, I left Monday morning to the airport to take my ride to Tokyo. When I got on the plane, I settled myself in with a my headphones, nook and pillow. The gentleman next to me settled in with a pillow, two Arby's sandwhiches and a few glasses of wine. You might be able to see where this is going... heavy set man, Arby's and a few glasses of wine. I took my Ambian in the hopes of dozing off into oblivion for six to eight hours, and I edged close to my transpacific slumber when the low sound of a fat, drunk man snoring started rattling the seat. I am not sure if my  noise cancelling headphones would have worked against the low frequencies eminating from my neighbor,
 but I can truly say that Ambian is no match for the fat man. Eventually I gave up on trying to sleep and started in a back to back run of Band of Brothers from beginning to end.  Mid way through episode 4, The Replacements, I experienced my first gas attack. The Arby's my travel partner had ingested were having their affect on his digestive track. His chemical assault did not end until episode 8, The Last Patrol. I couldn't wait to land. My travel companion was going to continue on to Korean where he could hide his pungent digestive aromas with the smell of Kim Chi.

I cleared customs quickly, bought my ticket to Tokyo Station on a friendly bus and took my 45 minute trip to Tokyo. As the bus approached the distant spires of Tokyo, I looked to my left as we passed Disney Tokyo and noticed the park had reopened. This was a welcome sign that Japan is getting back to normal.  The sun set as I pulled my luggage from the bus station to the hotel, and I had little inclination to leave the comforts of my room after I arrived.