It was dark when I finally landed at Kansai Airport. The runway is a spit out over the water flanking the town so it can feel like you’re putting down on water. I was too tired to appreciate it really, but very relieved to finally be on soil where I’m not treated like I’m a pathogen.
Knowing my limits, I’ve booked a cabin at the airport tonight. It’s cheap and very close to where we land. I go straight there and arrive twenty minutes early. My room is not ready yet because I said ten o’clock arrival so that is the time it will be ready. So I go back into the airport.
There’s a pharmacy and I’m looking for something that helps with nappy rash. The first plane was long and hot, sitting down for longer than I’m used to. Then China without the chance of a shower and the sweaty streets of Shanghai. My bum is a bit raw. Nothing to worry about so long as I look after it now. I don’t want to be thinking backwards as I’m walking forwards.
I’m so tired there’s no time for inspiration, and there’s an Italian restaurant right next to my cabin. I take a ticket and the computer voice tells me my table number. There’s a tablet and a menu in Japanese, but thankfully there’s also a human who clocks that my Japanese is bad and gives it to me in English. I order an Arrabiata with minced pork cos Japan, and a cold Kirin Ichiban. The beer is delivered by a human, and then a robot toodles up to my table with the pasta and asks me to take my food. Too tired to establish if I’m impressed or terrified, I do as it bids, eat it all up, and stagger next door to my cabin. It is one of a long row of such cabins. My bag won’t fit, but there’s a place to put things.
I do downstairs and sit on a heated loo seat, bliss, before getting into the most remarkable shower. I couldn’t make head or tail of the pharmacy so I’m going for natural solutions. I spend ages in the shower, then back up to my cabin where they’ve laid on uniform jimmy-jamas. Mine are large, which means sumo wrestler, but they have a drawstring so I can stop them falling down. No reading. No writing. I stick a few pictures into the Shanghai blog and fall deep asleep. Twice I have to go downstairs in the night – that’ll be the Kirin. But apart from that it is a long dead sleep and now I’m up and about, writing with my coffee before I have my first planned gentle day in Tennoji.
The next two days have been put by for jetlag and planning. No pressure to do much other than BE in Japan, with the obvious proviso that I’m terrible at just being with the ADHD monkey screaming at me all the time.
One thing I’ll need to do though is get more adventurous with food. Breakfast has been a panini and a latte, thanks to the robot. It’s the only place I could find that wasn’t Starbucks for coffee in the airport.
I’m off into town. If I can make sense of the railways.
AlBarclay 