Tuesday/Wednesday?
I’m not really sure what to put for this section since it’s a recap of our international flight that took like 17 hours.
The flight was scheduled for 6 AM, and my mom told me to make sure to get some sleep, but I ended up falling asleep like at 1 AM. The only reason this was an issue was because my family lives about an hour away from O’hare airport , and my sister wanted to get there about 3 hours early. The drive to O’hare was pretty quiet, and for such a big airport I was suprised how small This was my first flight since I was about 5 years old, and I am thankful she did this since we had issues with luggage for like an hour and it gave me time to settle in. Eventually I met up with Henry who I am doing this internship with, but pretty much all my pictures are unusable from this time. I actually forgot my gopro in the luggage and pretty ust had my passport, phone and switch with me.
For the flight we had a 3 hour layover in San Francisco, and on the way to there I pretty much slept the whole time. In the airport though I did some walking around, and it gave me sort of a surreal feeling. When I was about three years old my family moved to California and came back to Chicago when I was five years old. I always had these distant memories of mountains always either in the horizon or around and it was nice to sort of see them again. I also found a cool mural, but I was cutting it close to my flight at this point and went to walk back to the terminal. On the way there I got a juice that was like eight bucks for some reason and it was surprisingly spicy. It was worse for Henry though since apparently he was charged like 18 bucks for a salad and water.
I also slept for like half the flight to Japan, so I don’t have much to say about it. I was only really ever woken up when it was time to eat, and the food was surprisingly both included in the ticket and decent in quality. Other than that I just played my switch until we landed and took some videos of the coast and some other interesting like of how tiny the boats looked.
After we landed I was exhausted, but I still had to get my luggage go through customs and find the person picking us up. My phone no longer worked and just wanted to move into my room, but getting through all of this took close to an hour. Devesh, an IWU alumni, was still working at Technos College and guided us on our first afternoon in Japan. He took us by train to our apartment, and the chaotic nature of the public transportation is just something you can’t really explain in words. In the train everyone is all squished with no room to move especially since we were located so close to Tokyo city. At one point I was left behind staring at Devesh as the doors were closing. In the end I just got what was necessary out of my luggage left the rest on the floor and get some proper sleep (even though I had no blanket or pillow).