Well, hello all. I apologize for not including a packing or preparing post last night. I was just so excited (and nervous)! We’re currently sitting in the airport in Tokyo waiting for the flight that will take us to Osaka. It’s been pretty incredible so far! (Even if that was by far the longest time I’ve ever spent sitting in my life.)
We began this morning by leaving for the Albany airport at 5:00am. (My mom would probably say that this was “nothing” as she’s usually awake by then, but I feel that one’s sleep schedule gets shifted back several hours as soon as one enters college.) The flight from Albany into Newark was pretty easy and fast, but the plane we took was really small! A fair few people had to duck their heads to move about the cabin.
The Newark airport was very nice, but I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised by the random birds that kept flying overhead inside the building! We were able to board the big international flight pretty quickly and it was such a huge plane! The flight was a bit north of 13 hours, but I feel like it passed by fairly quickly. I ended up watching this really great movie about a monk who practiced the art of arranging flowers in the time of Hideyoshi which turned out to be really interesting! (I may have cried a fair bit during that movie — it was really great.) I was also able to see a lot of cool scenery out the plane window! To fly the shortest distance, the plane took a route that went up over Canada and Alaska and then came back down again. It was also pretty cloudless so there were a lot of breathtaking views of large sheets of ice and snow covered mountains that were completely visible!
Then we touched down in Tokyo. The airport is really cool! I have already tracked down three alternative flavors of kit-kat in my mission to find all of the strange flavors that exist here. (Rum-Raisin, wasabi, and sake, if anyone was actually curious.)
I am really excited to continue on towards Kyoto and towards all of the amazing things that we’re going to learn on this trip! I can’t wait to visit Tofuku-ji tomorrow! I am a bit nervous about having the opportunity to interview a Zen priest, so I think I’ll go review my notes a bit more while I have time.
Although today has been pretty long so far, it’s also been really great, and I can’t wait to get to Kyoto and to see where we’ll be staying!
See you tomorrow!
-Breelyn
