Good morning! We are at the Cafe Mokoteki using the internet once again this morning. We still don't have a good enough connection for me to post pictures (I think, I'll try but I'm not sure) so for now I will just update you.
We got to Japan Thursday afternoon. We landed at the Narita airport in Tokyo and then had to take a bus over to the Haneda airport and stay overnight at the Haneda Excel. The shuttle cost us 6000 yen!!! Which is equivalent to like 60 dollars when the yen rate and the dollar are even! So that sort of sucked because we only pulled out 10,000 yen. But anyway. It was like an hour ride to the airport. So we got there and got over to our hotel and checked in. It was really pretty and everyone was so nice. I didn't get many pictures of the room because the camera was dying but I did get a few. I will post a separate blog with pictures if necessary. Anyway we were supposed to hang out with Gary and Danielle but Danielle had forgotten we had her cellphone number so they didn't want to head out and wander around Tokyo looking for us because that would be a big waste of time and money so they didn't end up coming out. We just went to sleep for a really long time.
In the morning we woke up about 0800 and went downstairs for the breakfast buffet. It was quite expensive but it was good. Then we went back upstairs and were trying to figure out what we would do because we had to check out of our room at 1100 and our flight out of Haneda wasn't until 1700. So I decided to boot up our dying laptop and Skype Danielle. I woke her up but she was really happy to hear from me and instantly got up and began to get ready so she could meet us at the Haneda airport. We had a ton of luggage so while we waited for her we decided to go check our baggage so we could move around easier. We found her fairly easily (thanks to Sky's ridiculously awesome vision and Danielle's insanely good hearing) and were able to hang out for quite a few hours wandering the Haneda "airport." I put "airport" in quotations because that place was a freaking mall! We have some pictures of that too. Seriously. The basement floor was the train station, then there was one floor of straight airport stuff and a half floor of airport stuff and the rest of the four and a half floors were mall and the "observation deck." It was insane. We had some curry at a really cool place that there are a lot of, we didn't get pictures of this particular one but I will post some later because I'm sure there's one around the area like it. The way it works is there is a case with all of the dishes along with prices and "item numbers" and a vending machine type thing next to it so you pick what you want and then you insert yen and hit the corresponding item number and it gives you tickets, you then walk inside and hand the tickets to the staff and they give you your food. It really saves time if you don't know Japanese very well.
So after we hung out with Danielle we left to go through security since we thought with the language barrier it would be difficult (it was a total breeze, by the way). So then we are hanging out at our gate and a bus pulls up. So, there was a bit of confusion. We spotted a guy who looked military related so Sky asked if we took the bus to the plane and he confirmed. We then hung out for a while and talked. We expressed concern about getting to the base because we had not heard from our sponsor for the entire time we had been traveling and he told us that he had some friends meeting him at the airport so if we needed he was sure they could give us a ride. It was really awesome because we had no idea what to do when we landed, the airport was so small and we got in so late that even if there was usually a DOD liaison there they were probably long gone by the time we got in. So as we waited for our luggage we looked out and notice there was no one there who could possibly be our sponsor but we also saw that the nice Airman was waiting for us with a couple other people. After we loaded up our insane amount of luggage we came out and were talking to them. They all had relatively small cars so they ended up having to go back to base first and then come back for us, and they did so, with another friend in tow (just in case). They helped us load all of our luggage and brought us to the Misawa Inn to get checked in, brought us over to our room, helped us unload, and then took us to this cafe to eat. It was incredibly nice of them.
Then the next day (yesterday) the same Airman that helped us out that we had met in the airport (who had given us his number the night before) took us for a tour around the base since we still hadn't heard from/gotten a hold of our sponsor. He showed us pretty much everything (except where Sky works because he isn't in the same career field so he didn't know) and even took us to the BX so we could pick up a few things. Then he came back and we made him watch Tropic Thunder because its hilarious and if you haven't seen it you better be running out the door to get it. Then we went to the Mexican restaurant on base and had dinner. We then headed back to our room and decided out in the parking lot that we should do something else (because I'm an old lady and was falling asleep). So we headed to Dachas which is the Russian owned bar right off base and hung out, played pool, and I had my first alcoholic beverage in a bar. It was a Mai Tai and it was really good. The bartender was so adorable and precise. We then went right across the street and sang karaoke (badly). But we had a blast. Then we went home and got through one and a half episodes of Family Guy before going to sleep. Oh! And I wore my AWESOME fleece penguin footy pajamas which were SO comfortable and VERY cute! lol. Then we woke up and came here and I wrote this novel for you to enjoy. So you better enjoy it. :)
Sooo... I will try and post tomorrow but if not I'm sure you could re read this one. :) I will post pictures when I can. We're probably going to walk off base today and take some pictures of the places we went last night because I forgot to put the card back in the camera. So check back later!
PS: I forgot where I was going to put it but that whole mess about our sponsor and everything, my advice to all of you military affiliated people is get a Recall Roster BEFORE you get to your next base so if for some reason someone isn't there to meet you, you can call them at home!!! Because a duty number on a weekend of and AFTER A HOLIDAY DOES YOU NO GOOD!!! :p
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