Adventures in Japan

Day Done: So Long and Sayonara Sapporo

This is it. The last day. And a very short day to boot. Wait. No. It was a very long day. With not enough of it spent in Japan. And most of that Japan time was spent either in or on the way to airports.

We got a nice early start, because we only had e-tickets and for some reason could not check ourselves in over the web. Still got decent seats from Sapporo to Tokyo. But couldn't book our seats from Tokyo to Toronto, or get our luggage checked through. So a little more bother than we had wanted, but still no worries.

In Tokyo we managed to grab some emergency exit seats (hello legroom!), cancel our phones (with slightly more drama than we would have liked) and pick up a few more souvenirs before catching our flight. Seriously, we didn't ever stop moving.

Which really sucked for me. Because at some point whilst I was sleeping the night before soemone replaced the inner workings of my foot with napalm. Ow. And I couldn't lag. Our flights were too close together to dawdle.

So my lower right side was in pain. Or maybe all this talk of, all of this dwelling on the pain in my foot is just symbolic. I'm writing about the pain in my foot, but really I'm talking about the pain of leaving this amazing country. But I don't want to sound like a big baby. Too manly to mention how damn near everything is moistening up my eyes (damn you vinyl cafe and your gentle pulling of my heart strings! Don't you know of my delicate state?). So instead of dwelling on the sadness of the situation, I expound on pretend podiatric pain. Subtle, eh?

Except no. My foot really, really hurts. Leaving sucks, but so does my foot.

The plane did not suck. Even though it was Air Canada.

But Carla spent scads of time making sure that we were going to be flying on the newest of the new. And it paid off. The seats were comfy and they all had their own entertainment units. And our seats had legroom to spare. From time to time Carla would stick her feet straight out and wiggle them. And giggle. And I think the altitude had some kind of healing properties. My foot felt much, much better.

The free booze was a delightful bonus.

And the entertainment options were a perfect balance of stuff we wanted to see (Charlie Wilson's War) and stuff that would put us to sleep (10,000BC). We wanted to make sure we had enough sleep to make it through a full day in Toronto.

We kinda sorta did. Make it through the day. We stayed in a hotel near the airport but nothing else. There was nothing to do but notice how annoying it is to understand everything on TV. And how big serving sizes are and how much everything costs.

We missed Japan before we left, now we miss it more.