Come Fly With Me…

It was early on a Saturday morning, I had just raced too Gimhae Airport outside of Busan to catch an early morning flight. After the rush to get checked in and to get through security and immigration to catch my 7:50 flight, I finally had a few minutes to sit. I grabbed a cinnamon bun and an iced coffee. “Breakfast of champions…” I thought as I sat there watching Aircraft after Aircraft take off.

I slipped into the old habit of starring out at the tarmac at all the parked planes, at the elevators and ailerons, landing gear and components thinking ‘I wonder what the patch is for’ or ‘If some poor engineer somewhere in Seattle was racing all day to get a maintenance package out for any of these boeings’. Old habits die hard I guess, it didn’t matter, I didn’t have to worry about patches or repairs, I hadn’t had too in close to 6 months now… I didn’t have to think about Engineering, or even Teaching for that matter. It was time for a much needed vacation, 8 days solo in Japan, and that was all that counted.

Our flight took off, and after how impressed I was with Korean Air on the way out to Asia, I was just as impressed with Japan Airlines. For a two hour flight, I got a free breakfast (a proper breakfast, not just some crackers), I didn’t have to pay for any drinks, and didn’t have to swipe a credit card to watch any of the movies (Looking at you Delta Airlines…). I’m really realizing how much customer service in the west as gone the way of the dinosaurs just to save a few bucks.

As quick as we were up, we were over Japan, the mountains peaking out between the clouds. It didn’t take long for the contrasts between Korea and Japan to precipitate; For one, the security in Gimhae were outfitted in what I can only assuming were semi automatics, where as in Japan they were on Segways. The other glaring difference was lack of Wifi. In Korea it’s everywhere, in Japan…at least Tokyo…its no where. After landing at Narita International, it was a quick bus ride too Tokyo Station.  I had an address for my hostel and remembered roughly what section of town it was in, but exactly on a map…not so sure. After a half hour walk across town to and then another 30 minutes of aimlessly wondering looking for the place, I’d found it.

Capsule Corp.

One thing I heard was to try out the capsule hotels. At 6’5″, I’m not a small guy, and Asia in general is not a place which often caters to me. Despite the crampedness of the capsule, it was still an experience none the less.

I dropped my bags off at the hostel, and then decided to go off and explore town.

Imperial Palace Grounds

Since I only had 8 days, I wanted to take advantage of every minute I had there, but it being Day 1, I wanted to take it easy. So I decided just to wonder around town and see what I could see. The Imperial Palace grounds were beautiful, but also huge and completely surrounded by a mote. There really isn’t a lot to say about it that the pictures don’t them selves, so here are the ones which stood out.

Worth Seeing: 3.5 Impassable Bog Moats out of 5. Beautiful area, but unfortunately you can’t enter the grounds, which no blogs or travel posts had mentioned.

Getting There: It is directly North West From Tokyo Station.

From there I kept walking to see what I could see, at one point even seeing the Yakuza driving around in their blue vans with mounted megaphones blaring messages out just like they were in the vice piece about them. I was thinking how interesting it was to see something random like that after watching the documentary on it not to long before. What I hadn’t realized yet was how not-random it really was given what day it was. More on that in my next post.

As with all of my posts, the rest of the pictures can be seen on my flickr here.