October 10, 2005
Tokyo to London
We got up at 6:30 to go and check in. I wanted the exit row again, but someone beat me to it. We did get a window seat again though, so I was happy. After our checkin, we went and got ready for breakfast. Our room came with a free buffet breakfast. We filled up on the usual breakfast stuff and then went and got ready to leave. Down onto the bus again and into Narita Airport again. Now that it was day time I could see the size of this place. It was absolutely massive. I can’t wait to get onto Google Earth to see the airport from above. The bus dropped us off at Terminal 2 departures and we headed inside throw customs. I thought I was going to have no end of problems getting my bag loaded with the laptop computer and other electrical stuff, but they just chucked the whole bag through the scanner. I had more trouble getting through the scanner myself, having to go through 5 times to be cleared. The problem ended up being my watch, which was strange seeing as I have had no problem with it anywhere else. Now we made our way to the departure gate. I saw that there was information on Narita wireless Internet, so I tried to connect to it. There must have been a problem with the service at the time because my credit card wouldn’t work with it. So I gave up and listened to some music instead. We flew on a Boeing 777, which was exciting because both Carmen and I haven’t ever been on one before. The 777 has the personal TV monitors, so we could choose what we watch and when. I watched “War of the Worlds”, “Batman Begins”, “Herbie Reloaded”, and some other 80’s movie that I can’t remember the name of. Carmen watched “Cinderella Man” instead of “Batman”. We had a bit of a Tetris competition to pass the time as well - Carmen ended up winning by 1 point, but I wasn’t that fussed. We both tried to sleep on the flight but didn’t have any luck. We landed in Heathrow to perfect weather. We were expecting huge security at Heathrow, but there was no visible security at all. Actually, Heathrow was a big surprise because there was hardly anyone around. We got through customs in around 10 minutes. We then walked to the Tube station to head to our friend Kelly’s house in Shephards Bush. I was carrying my big backpack and towing Carmen’s suit case - all 27kg of it - when the handle to the suitcase snapped off. Just what we needed, a broken suitcase to lug around. We got on the train and headed off. After a short walk from the Tube station we were at Kelly’s house. Kelly wasn’t home from work yet, but one of her flat mate’s let us in. We sat and waited for a few hours - struggling to stay awake. It turns out that Kelly lives with 10 other people. Pretty crazy place, but we are assured that there is never 11 people around at the one time. Kelly took us out to dinner to a Thai restaurant down the road. After dinner we went back home and crashed to sleep. We worked it out that we had been up for around 24 hours, so it was a huge day really.
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