Warning: No pictures in this entry. We were tired and didn't see a lot of things worth taking pictures of until dinner anyway, and were at that point more concerned with pigging out.
Our night on the town the day before notwithstanding, our flight from Singapore back to Japan was an early one. Really early. We set the alarms in the hotel room for 2:50AM to get a 3AM taxi (subway doesn't run all night) to reach the airport at 3:40, to give us about ninety minutes to clear security and so forth before they close the airplane doors half an hour before our scheduled departure time of 5:45AM. There was one flight with open seats later in the day...for a $400 per person premium. Not worth it, though when I asked Ana if she had anything to contribute to the notebook I was keeping to help remember small details her response was "tired".
Anyway, we were flying Delta for this leg of the trip, and this flight would later continue through Narita to land in Detroit, which meant it was an international flight terminating in the US. We hadn't noticed this before, but apparently that is a recipe for security being totally ridiculous, even for US citizens. A member of the "Auxiliary Police" questioned us about our travel plans and they broke the tiny little nail file off Ana's miniature nail clippers. For the record, airport security is nearly pointless*. They definitely crank up the pressure for flights ending in the US, though.
Despite the extra heat brought down for this flight, the overall process of getting to the plane was not problematic and I think both of us pretty much slept through most of the flight itself. The six plus hour flight felt like about 20 minutes, though I can't say that afterward we felt entirely lively and charged up. The train from Narita Airport to Tokyo proper takes about an hour, and then it takes a further 45 minutes to an hour to take the subway to KIT's condo, where we immediately pulled out the futons for a nap.
Two hours of real sleep later, we were feeling sort of alive again, and started thinking about dinner. A relative of mine gets sent to Tokyo to work by the company he's with for a couple of months a year and happened to be in town at the time. He's spent a lot more time eating in Tokyo than us so we tossed some ideas around and trusted to his knowledge of the dining scene to steer us right, and he got reservations for all of us at a churrascaria (Brazilian steakhouse) called Barbacoa so we could get a red-meat fix before heading back to the rice-eating wilderness of Kanazawa.
Barbacoa turned out to be entirely satisfying (it's off Omote-sando station, exit A2 and then make a right if people in Japan want to go) and actually very reasonably priced. It is all-you-can-eat as such places usually are and we gorged on superior animal products and generally had a good time. The $25 all-you-can-drink menu didn't hurt either as their caipirihinas were tasty though very strong.
I'd say that about wraps up day 9 of this trip. For day 10 we stay in Tokyo and do some shopping as well as have one of those only-in-Japan experiences when we visit a cat cafe on the top floor of a department store.
*unless they start disallowing electronic devices with batteries, since you can make batteries explode. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery, end of second paragraph. Also you could use raw heavy alkali metals in pseudo-batteries and just add water to produce a serious explosion. See this video that was originally shown by the BBC at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqeVEFFzz7E. They'd also need to start scanning people for internally carried non-metallic weapons or explosives to prevent say, the rectal or stomach carrying of high explosives that you could then detonate using electricity from a laptop battery. There must be a lot more ideas that someone with some actual knowledge of destructive devices could use to reliably beat currently employed screening practices. Barring a much higher level of security, how about we forgo the rest of this rigmarole? It costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year to implement and probably more than that in the effective cost of lost time. At least stop caring about edged weapons; they can't bring down a plane.
(Ana's edit - screen him, not me, I was uninvolved with this train of thought)
(Lee's addendum: Note for national security personnel - I am a young engineer and I want to live. Please don't send the black helicopters for me.)
No comments:
Post a Comment