Leaving in blue skies … again
The morning happened a little bit quicker this morning than anticipated after we read what the checkout time of our hotel was. We originally planned so that we can nicely stroll out of the hotel into the Shinkansen, which turned into being slightly more tired, spending an hour at the non-Starbucks café across the road, and then strolling onto the Shinkansen.
After rather miserable visibility over the last few days, with the odd patch of rain, we of course leave on the day with beautiful blue skies. Sadly, these skies did not maintain all the way to Tokyo, and parts of Japan appear to have had a significant amount of rain considering that there were some Shinkansen closures. Luckily, the part we were travelling through was not affected. Even if my travel companion claims that he got hit by a single rain drop at some point and immediately complained.
There were few more strolls through the warm weather and some last minute purchases of things we could only get in Tokyo, and we pretty quickly had to make our way to the airport.
I haven't left from Haneda Airport before, being far more used to Narita. The place looks more modern, and I assume that it was recently enlarged to allow for the flights that previously went to Narita to land here now.
But having found some nice reclining seats, I'm rather relaxed waiting for my flight, certainly far more relaxed than I was in Australia, where the Customs officer was aggressively shouting people through, yelling at them when they wanted to wait for their family member right behind them. Here my customs officer seems to have been slightly distracted by the small child which was running circles around it's parents, trying to stop her from accidentally crossing through, but also smiling out of amusement.
This is usually the point where Washinoko would pose in front of some fancy plane, but unfortunately the only thing that the photo shoot would produce here is reflections of the drug store behind me. There seems to be so much glass in multiple layers, it's nearly impossible to see anything at all at night. So you'll just have to imagine the plane this time. As far as I am aware, it is another Dreamliner I'll be on, a plane which I still haven't made up my mind of from the flight here.
The windows are slightly bigger, but it's not the massive difference that all the advertisement would suggest. The infotainment system seemed like the same from other modern flights. In calm weather, the thing felt quite solid under your feet as opposed to the constant floating feeling I have in other planes. Unfortunately, I suspect this made the plane actually worse for me as the plane also had a spontaneous breaking point of an airbump which you would not be able to feel in the cabin, and one which was definitely noticeable in the cabin. This harsh tipping point for the gliding smoothness seemed to toy with my motion-sickness more rather than less, compared to normal flights. And if the seats were bigger, my knees are still perfectly capable of being folded against the seat in front of me. So …
At least the air quality is indeed quite a bit nicer, something which my travel companion regards as the only feature worth considering.
Either way, I guess I have a second chance to try it out.
