After a Thirteen-hour flight from Chicago to Tokyo I was exhausted. I was beyond exhausted; only the adrenaline of stepping foot into a new country was keeping me on my feet. The first thing I noticed was the heat. It felt like I was stepping foot off the plane into Arkansas then five minutes later the humidity hit, and I about fell over. It was overwhelmingly humid, and I was instantly drenched in sweat. Walking into Haneda Airport felt so nice; the cool air blowing was a life send. I was starting to regret coming. I do not like heat or humidity and mixing them is horrible. Immigration and customs were up next. I have never been out of America before and did not know what to expect. It was really easy. Get in line, complete a form, get in another line, wait, wait some more, and wait some more. It was a long wait. Then walk up to the counter, give them all your paperwork, then they give you your residence card and work visa and immigration is done. Now for customs. I had arrived with two other tech students, and I decided to wait on them and keep an eye out for our luggage. About thirty minutes later my friend was through immigration as well and I hadn’t seen our luggage. We wondered about it but figured it would meet us in Nagoya after our last flight. So, to customs we went, after more lines and filling out another form and more waiting we made it through customs easily. Now to find which part of the airport we needed to go to for our last flight. This is where google translate came in handy. We made it to our airport line, and I was excited just another few hours and I’d be in Nagoya.
At the front desk the ladies asked us for our checked luggage after much google translating. We looked at each other. Have we already messed up? I stood by the carousel after immigration waiting on our luggage and had never seen it. Turns out the immigration line was so long that we missed getting our checked bags. So, we now had to figure out where to go to get help and after talking to a few different people as best as our broken Japanese and their broken English and google translate could we finally found a help desk. All the while my phone kept ringing with a private number that I couldn’t answer since my phone plan wasn’t international. Whenever I tried to answer it hung up. But the ladies at the help desk called for the air line and someone came to meet us to bring us back to customs to grab our luggage and then we went bag to our air line. This time we checked our luggage and got our new boarding passes and went to our terminal. This part was the easiest for me. We did not need to take our shoes off. We only had to put our stuff on the table and take off our metal and go through a metal detector then grab our stuff and go to our gate. There wasn’t a line, so it was over fairly quickly. We only had about forty-five minutes until our plane took off. It was the quickest I had ever been through a TSA check. While waiting for our plane to get there I had my first ever Japanese food. It was a salmon onigiri and I hated it. When our plane arrived, they put us on a shuttle and drove us halfway across the airport to our plane. From there it was an hour’s flight to Nagoya where our school is located. Once in Nagoya we had an overnight wait, so we decided to get an air b & b and come back the next day for pick up. We put our luggage in a luggage storage area and braved the Japanese public transport system.
The next day we went back to the airport and got our luggage out of storage and waited in the lobby area for our ride. While waiting, an officer came up to us and asked if we had resident cards or passports. I was terrified. Maybe we were not supposed to be waiting there, or something had happened but after giving her our residence cards she gave them back and went on her way. A few hours later our ride was here, and it was time to go.
Looking crazy after over 20 hours of flying on three different planes and no sleep.