Holy Crap

What a week!
I've arrived in Japan seven days ago today, and the chain of events that finally led to me sitting here at Kansai Gaidai could not have been more stressful and fantastic if I had attempted to distort it with a heavy pudding binge. As I am on a bit of a tight schedule, I'll give you the short version of the journey, and then follow it up some time this week with more details and photos.

1. Arrive at Detroit Metro Airport
2. Wait three hours longer for flight due to typhoon in Tokyo
3. Get on plane, wait another hour due to unwell passenger
4. Fly to Japan. 13 hours
5. Arrive in Narita Airport, discover that the flight to Osaka is cancelled
6. Panic
7. Go through customs, find luggage
8. Ask follow NW 25 passenger what to do. Says take a train.
9. Find Info Desk. Learn that trains are closed.
10. Panic
11. Wait in Narita for four hours while trying to contact air service with other 400 passengers.
12. Learn that the connection with North West does not provide English.
13. Super cool phone booth prints reimbursement ticket, regardless of our shortcomings with the language.
14. Read ticket, discover that we are now flying to Seoul, Korea then to Osaka.
15. Panic
16. Notice the diminishing numbers of passengers, wonder where they are going; Realize that Narita has called a hotel to house us for the night.
17. Catch last bus to hotel. Sleep for two hours. Catch bus back for morning flight.
18. Find luggage check in Narita. Wait in line. Turn in bags.
18a. Luggage attendant seems troubled, calls for backup.
19. New attendant runs us through customs and security, tells us we need reentry visas to come back from Seoul.
19a. We don't have reentry visas, we were meant to go to Osaka
20. Panic
21. Panic
22. Attendant breaks out his mighty bureaucracy shattering power, gets us through waiting lines and gives us reentry visas.
23. Thank super sexy attendant twelve times, barely catch flight to Seoul.
24. Arrive in Seoul. Do happy dance because what else could go wrong?
25. Buy trinkets, make way toward terminal
26. Ask terminal attendant about luggage.
26a. Learn that no one knows where our luggage is.
27. (what do you think goes here?)
28. Catch flight anyway, not missing flight to Osaka
29. Arrive at Kansai International. Find luggage, get through customs.
30. Find Kansai Gaidai staff waiting for us at entrance.
31. Happy Dance
32. Arrive at Seminar House. Find room. Shower. Sleep like baby who'd been awake for 56 hours.

And this is just the first two days. Admittedly, most of the panic came just from the flight, but now we can move on to cheerier things. I'll update this post throughout the week with more details, so check every now and again.

Cheers.