Bali,
balibound2k15,
Singapore,
Tokyo,
travel,
wanderlust,
writerlife
Bali Bound: Days 1-2
Day 1-2: Friday, August 21-Saturday, August 22
Newark to Tokyo to Singapore
Maybe don't count the hours, I tell myself obsessively as I remember that I forgot to add the commute to the airport. I'm definitely not a numbers person, so as the legs add up and I try to juggle time changes, things are getting complicated.
The flight to Japan is 14 hours. The layover is 4. It's another 7h10 until we land in Singapore. The commute is an hour, plus the two hours we need to arrive prior to departure. Oh and it will take half an hour to get to my dad's house. Oh and however long the car ride is to the hotel. So that's... (I always try to do the math on my head first, inevitably just to give up and use my phone calculator) 29 hours? I try to do the math based on the time change: we take off at 11am and land at 1:55pm, Tokyo time. They are 13 hours ahead of us, so we land at 1:55am tomorrow. Plus 4 hours plus 7h10.. We land in Singapore at midnight Saturday, which is actually noon Saturday... So that's 25 hours plus a one hour commute on either side plus 2 hours in Newark beforehand... The math probably checks out. Now, how on earth am I supposed to sync myself to local time without missing out on a moment of daylight?
Maybe don't count the hours.
My strategy is to stay up late the night before the flight (definitely not because I couldn't have been bothered to pack earlier - it's strategy) and try to fall asleep for a few hours so by the time I land I can psych myself into believing it's 2pm. The entire flight I look at the "time at destination" line to get my bearings, and it works.
I spend my time watching movies and taking pictures of my feet on the plane.
We land in Tokyo and while my father rests his eyes in the lounge, Andrew, Steph, PJ, and I explore the airport. We immediately immerse ourselves in True Japanese Culture by saying "konnichiwa" (hello) and "arigatou" (thank you) at every appropriate instance. Ever the linguist, it has completely slipped my mind that I might want to communicate anything else while in Japan, so I have to make do with the phrases I learned in "Current World Studies (Japan and India)" from high school. The only other word I have at the ready is "go" which means 5. Unless someone asks me how many people are in our party, this one probably won't be terribly helpful.
After going into every possible Japanese shop in the terminal, it also occurs to me that I haven't checked the exchange rate from yen to dollars. Pro tip: research your layovers maybe. Or just find out the exchange rate when you get your credit card statement- I'm not here to tell you your life.
We bought green tea kit kats from a store that looks like this:
and passed a McDonald's with the longest line I've ever seen:
When we felt like we had immersed ourself successfully into True Japanese Culture, we finished the layover with some sushi and snapchat drawings:
My strategy for the next flight was to stay awake as long as possible, but a few hours sleep would be okay. As long as I was tired, it would feel like midnight-ish, right?
An utterly uncountable amount of hours later, we arrived at our first destination with a bed: Singapore.
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