Arriving in Japan

It's a little like following Alice down the rabbit hole -- you get on the plane in Newark, NJ, the plane takes off around 11 am on Monday, you fly and fly, the plane lands, and it's Tuesday afternoon at Narita Airport (about an hour from Tokyo). As usual, I took several naps during the 13-1/2 hour flight. We were served lunch (for Monday), a "midnight" snack, and breakfast/lunch (for Tuesday). I watched two movies -- Disney's "The Princess and the Frog" (delightful!) and "Up in the Air" (really, really good plus George Clooney being adorable) -- and two episodes each of two tv shows (30 Rock and The Big Bang Theory), read a book and a magazine, and got up and walked numerous times. One of the tricks I learned from Kate was to have control of the aisle.

We took the Narita Express to Shinigawa, location of a big train station; our hotel is right across the street. Along the way we saw many rice paddies and other small farm plots. After checking in and dumping our stuff in our room, we went back across the street to the food market that is under the train station. We bought various sushi, pickles, noodles, yakitori, and iced green tea to eat in our room. In an attempt to stay up relatively late we were going for a walk, but it is raining. Japan doesn't do daylight savings, so it gets dark early, by 7:30 pm; it also gets light very early.

Here are photos from today. Tomorrow I will try to sound more awake (and coherent). To make things interesting, Google keeps giving me the Blog page in Japanese.