Marooned in Japan

Narita Airport is a boring god damned place to have a five-hour layover. I’m too tired and the chairs are too uncomfortable to read for any length of time. I’ve got lots of music and Daily Shows on my mp3 player, but I don’t want to use it because I’ve got an eleven-hour flight coming up, making battery charge a valuable commodity. But there’s 10-minutes-for-100-yen Internet, so hey, might as well make a blog.

I’ve flown three different airlines in my recent years as a world traveller, Air Canada, Korean Air, and now Japan Airlines, and let me recommend the last to anyone out there travelling in or around East Asia. Sure, the plane may feel a little rickety, maybe it makes the odd unsettling noise, but on Japan Airlines every seat — even economy — gets its own video screen and remote!

And oh, the things they do with that screen. You’ve got a bunch of movies on there (including The Host, with, of course, no English subtitles), though they have their own set starting times. There’s a long list of Infogrames-made games, many of them familiar, but you’ll need to try them out to know which is which. Try “Volcano Drop” if you’re in the mood for some Tetris.

The screen’s got an information display, that gives you the skinny on altitude, airspeed, time to destination, that kind of thing, plus a map, with Indiana Jones-style red line of travel. But the best thing on the screen is the camera display. They’ve got a couple of cameras, one below the cockpit looking forward, and one on the plane’s belly looking down, and you can bring up these feeds on demand. I’ll be on Japan Airlines from Japan to Australia as well, and I’m looking forward to getting in some more “Alien Blaster,” aka Arkanoid. Actually, I’m not, because the remote for it isn’t nearly responsive enough. But there’s solitaire too, if need be.

Can’t promise I’ll keep this page up. It’s quite possible that I’ll actually be too busy in Australia to spew garbage on a webpage. But I will probably be taking pictures, so maybe I’ll just spew pictures on a webpage. I’ll probably find time in my first few days, seeing as how I don’t have a hotel until my Mum arrives. I’ll need something to do in lieu of sleeping. And just think of the wacky adventures in narcolepsy I’ll be able to write about!