First day = very long

Ok, first thing, the airport is very quiet at 5:30am and waiting around for 1 hour is quite boring. Even worse is arriving in auckland and getting to the international departure lounge to find your plane that was scheduled to leave at 9:15am is now boarding at 10:15am. So about 11:15am the plane left the ground.

Here's a good example of "perfect timing". Brunch service has just completed and the drinks have been served, so what should happen.........turbulence! Apart from a few bumpy sections of flight, a couple naps and about 4 movies, not much else to say except that all of the flight attendants thought i was japanese. First sentence to learn "Nihongo wa hanashimisen" which means "I don't speak Japanese". That sentence is getting a lot of use, but you can pretty much get by in Tokyo with just English, but doesn't hurt to learn some basics.

Touching down about 7:30pm local time as opposed to the scheduled 4:25pm may have been the reason for long immigration queues, but they moved through everyone pretty quickly. From the actual arrival gate everyone walks to a train which takes you to the main terminal for all the immigration and customs. Once in i was through it was just a matter of hiring a cell phone and getting the train into tokyo. Quite strange that Japan is still working with cash, it's very rare to see places with eftpos and banking is still done with bankbooks and actually visting the bank, although ATM's will update your bankbook when withdrawing money. Having said that their technology won't accept any cell phone that isn't a 3G mobile, hence the reason i hired one. Arriving into the west side of Tokyo in Shinjuku was close to 9pm, meeting my friend we made our way to one of his friends apartments where we ended up playing games and watching a movie, at which time it happened to be about 2am local time (6am NZ time) so that was a very long first day.