Tokyo, not quite there...

Despite being a 12+ hour flight, the journey from Portland to Tokyo wasn’t all that bad. It was the first time I have been on a flight that served two full meals, the second one being breakfast despite the fact that it was not morning in either Portland or Japan, so I’m still a little fuzzy on that one.

Being on a flight with a significant number of Japanese people brought a whole new mindset for me. Being nearly 6’5”, I just don’t think about boarding a plane and getting my bag in the overhead compartment. As we were boarding I didn’t really notice anyone else getting their belongings properly stowed, but mid-flight I couldn’t help but notice what would be a bit of an issue for a smaller people. I watched as a man got up out of his seat and proceeded to climb onto the arm of his seat and blindly dig through a bag he couldn’t properly see in the overhead compartment. I wonder if this is just normal fare for smaller people groups, or whether planes designed with smaller people in mind have more readily accessible storage. A silly thing to occupy my thoughts, but many of you know I often think long and hard about things of little or no real importance.

I was thinking on the plane how long flights are a bit like some sort of odd, dysfunctional surrogate family. People can’t choose their family members, and on a plane you can’t choose your flight-mates. You’re all in it together and you all are experiencing the same basic things: turbulence, bad food, good food, foul odors (some experience more of these than others, depending on whether they had the chicken or beef), cranky flight attendants. And yet, there are still individual experiences to be had: the older man who feels obligated to tell his entire life story in order to explain why he has two carry-ons, the choir of colicky babies, the reading light right next to you still illuminated as its user fell asleep. It’s a bit of a microcosm of life, a mobile eco-dome of sorts. Strange, if you think about it.

So far I’m doing well staying up in a potentially fruitless attempt to quickly reset my internal clock. My computer clock says it’s 1:35am, but local time is most definitely 16 hours ahead of that. Once we arrive in Bangkok, I’m sure we’ll be ready to just conk out. Just have to stay up another nine hours, which isn’t too much of a problem for someone my size. Hard to curl up into a ball and just sleep the flights away. Hopefully I won’t give Mandi too many stories to tell about how grumpy I can get when I’m sleep-deprived. We shall see...

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