In transit at Narita Airport
Hello from Tokyo! I’m currently in transit at Narita Airport. My flight is not till another 4 hrs’ time. Managed to find a Yahoo! free internet cafe here so i’m camping out here until they ask me to leave. The only problem here is that all the software on this computer is in Japanese so i’m navigating by memory. Also, the arrangment of the keyboard is really weird so i keep pressing the wrong keys. Only the alphabets and numbers are in the same positions. All the special symbols and punctuations have been shifted around. I look like a computer idiot, staring at the keyboard hunting for certain keys as i type. It’s not helped by the fact that the spacebar is only half its usual size and the other half is taken up by keys that change the keyboard from typing english characters to japanese kanji (or whatever they call it). Took a few minutes to figure out how to stop sprouting nonsensical japanese characters and get back to typing english. Oh well, shouldn’t complain too much as all this is free.
Now i’m fighting the urge to sleep as I haven’t been able to sleep on the flight so effectively i didn’t sleep through the whole night (SG time). If i get too tired i’ll probably log off and get some sleep at the dayrooms which are provided at 6.50+ an hour. But then again, if i can hold out longer, i’ll be more tired on the long flight over and hopefully able to sleep through most of it.
The time difference here is only an hour ahead. The flight over was uneventful except for a spot of turbulence on descent, when the plane fell and rose by quite a significant bit. Managed to catch Spiderman 3 and half of some movie which i forgot the title of. Hopefully can continue where i left off on the next flight. The only other interesting movie to watch is Shrek 3. Sigh. So far, nobody has come close to beating Singapore Airlines’ inflight entertainment programme. You can literally watch movies from start to end on long haul SIA flights. Oh well, you get what you pay for i suppose.
When i arrived here at 6am, narita airport was absolutely DEAD. Not a single shop was open and only a few transitting passengers like me were wandering around the deserted hallways of the airport. Had to wait around for nearly 2 hrs before the shops started opening. I stood waiting outside this Yahoo! cafe a few minutes before it opened with a small group of other internet junkies. Managed to grab a good seat by the window with a view of the airplanes sitting on the tarmac. One shortfall that i’m just beginning to realise though is that the rising sun shining through the window is beginning to make it harder to read off the LCD screen.
Anyway, I’m off to read more about Nikon’s latest DSLRs, the D3 and D300! Will probably post a short update before i leave later.