Things about the trip there

• Spicks and Specks on TV in the terminal while waiting for the plane - but only on the TV in the kid's area, so had to sit on a bright blue and red stained couch to watch it. Made me homesick in advance, though.
• Saw both of the Navigator banners that we did for AFR on the display in the terminal - much bigger in person, and they're right, the AFR logo that displays at the end isn't on the screen for long enough.
• Was able to satify my gyoza thing at the Wagamama in the terminal - noodles, at the airport, for dinner! Amazing. But after you order they give you a number to put on your table and he tried to give me number 13 - no, I don't think so, not before a long plane journey, I'd like another number please! So I ended up number 45.
• I thought it was brilliant that they could check my bags all the way through to Denver, since the Dallas-Denver leg was on a different reservation. I tried to express my surprise and gratitude to the Qantas check-in agent but he was all business and stuck to his script. (This will turn out to be ironic given what happened on the way back.)
• When I got on the plane the muzak was Four Seasons in One Day from She Will Have Her Way. Still amazes me living in a country that can have ambient Neil Finn, after him being our own little secret for so long.

Narita

• Shiseido counter had a huge poster advertising face-whitening cream. I still find this whole concept shockingly racist and discriminatory. I was there before all the shops opened so was able to watch all the uniformed worker ladies arrive, and you could tell which ones use face-whitening cream and which don't - the artificially whiteners all looked sort of blue and sickly, like someone who has had a very bad flu for a while. Beauty, huh?
• I finally decided to try out the buttons on the toilet. The one with the little musical notes doesn't actually play music, it just plays a recording of a flushing sound, to mask other sounds you might be making (like maybe laugher?). Mystery of the Japanese musical toilets solved!
• The main place to eat was called "Bowl Bowl". I love that. The first "bowl" is for the thing that all the food comes in, since it was mainly a noodle place. I think the second was the sort of Americanised word that just means "place", like from 50's diners and things.
• I had planned to kill time watching a movie in the video room, of which I have found memories from my first trip through Narita which must have been in 1998. This was a place where you could pay about $5 US and sit in a comfy black chair and watch a movie on your own screen, with speakers built into the sides of the chair by your head. There was a sign downstairs for the video room, but it didn't appear on the "You are here" maps of the terminal upstairs, and the little worker folks hadn't ever heard of such a thing before - guess because they were only 9 last time I came through town they might not have seen it before. I think the video room had turned into the...
• Yahoo! internet room. Gorgeous, clean room full of computers on big tables, and a big window with a view to the planes outside. Between each machine was some notepaper in a pastel plastic clip with a fanciful shape, and beside that was a little bonzai palm tree in a pretty glass bowl.
• The character for "passenger" is the character for "person" inside a box!
• There was a girl on my plane with a shirt that should be on Engrish.com. I didn't see everything that was on the back, but the front said, in big black letters, "Royality Crown". Sometimes when you're in Japan you feel a bit like you're losing your grip on royality, so I was glad to see the shirt...

American Airlines, Tokyo-Dallas

• There was a group of four or five young men who were quite striking - black, all pretty tall, dressed flambouyantly in black and white, bling, expensive shoes, loud white jackets. A rap band? Dancers? Karate champions? One of them was supposed to sit by me - really tall black kid but with a dancer's languidness to his movements, white leather jacket, black jeans slung low, white framed sunglasses worn backwards on the back of his head, hair up about a foot in an afro, and a white band around his head with japanese characters and a bit red sun and the whole bit. He was nice, smiley, sort of a flirt, but quite vague, and didn't really respond to questions in the way you'd expect, he just sort of looked. He was after one of the rows of seats in the middle, and the hosties actually helped him find one with three seats in a row, which was good for me because then I got my two seats on the side all to myself. He responded kind of vaguely to them as well, in fact one even asked, "Are you alright?" I thought they must be Dallas B-Boys headed back home from something or other. However, when we arrived, they all went in the line for non-US citizens. And I thought - maybe he's Japanese! Maybe he was so vague because he doesn't actually have much English. Very strange to have a tall black kid in hip-hop clothes be Japanese, but hey, it's a big world. And Japanese B-Boys dress flambouyantly just like these black guys did. It could also be, though, that he was vague because he was smacked out on something - he slept the whole, whole trip, 11 hours long - or maybe he was just a little stupid. I guess we will never know.
• Feeling on the plane as we started passing over the continental US and I could see the names of American places on the map with the little airplane - the exquisite sadness of the expat experience - both places are home, so you always miss someplace no matter where you are.
• But in some ways I have been away too long - when I asked the hostie about the rules about liquids on domestic flights, she said, "It's the same, you have your little three ounces..." And I looked at her completely blankly, thinking, "Three? What? Ounces? How the heck much is that?" 100 mls, baby, that's how big the little bottles are!