The Enola Wheat - From Take Off to Dropping It Like It Was 10,000 Degrees

Well the day started simply enough, I “finished” packing (and I say that because at this moment I haven’t thought of anything important I forgot to pack) at about 3:30 AM, and decided to take a cat nap until 5 or so. I woke up to wash the last stink of America off of me before charging into a country that subsists almost entirely on raw fish. We got to the airport without too much fanfare, parked, got a bus to the American Airlines terminal, which thankfully wasn’t busy at all. We had plenty of room to vent and gesticulate wildly when we had to pay 86 dollars to check a third bag. The suit carrier I packed to keep my suits from getting wrinkled had to be discarded so I could stuff the suits into an already overstuffed suitcase. They also informed us that, despite the forms I had printed which listed in bold lettering that international flights sent all of your bags to the final destination, my bags would only go as far as the first airport. In fact that line that soothed my worries of scrambling for my luggage and finding the right bus to go to a different airport within a couple of hours of landing in a country whose signs are going to be pictures of boxes and dashed lines, was kind of like an airline set of dinosaur bones. It was simply put there to test my faith in the incompetence of American Airlines. After a thorough pat down from a large black guy with what I can only assume was a metal detector I was through customs and on my way to the gate.
While waiting at the gate I decided it’s entirely unlikely I will ever be able to understand a single Japanese person over 60, no matter how fluent I become in the language. They have a specific kind of mumble that I can’t quite put my finger on, and because their mouths are generally smaller, you get kind of an old prospector’s whistle added in. Suffice to say I give up, the old people win, unfortunately they won’t be able to enjoy their victory being so pre-occupied with outrunning death, who surprisingly still flies coach.
The plane I’m riding in is a 777, and I know what you’re all thinking, that’s the luckiest god damn plane in the fleet. How many sevens can you pile into one flight design? Unfortunately, 21…eh…not so much a lucky number, remember how 21 jump street ended? No? That’s right, because nobody does. 21 jump street is a lot like a 14 hour flight, it begins a bunch of people trying to go to sleep even though they know they can’t because Johnny Depp is going to take off his shirt, it was inevitable that once an episode Johnny Depp was topless, and you could lose yourself in those chiseled abs like watching the clouds break and re-form above the Canadian Rockies. Yet somehow the show was still awful because 21 is an unlucky number. However, to honor the sacrifice of all those wasted hours, I now dub this craft the Boeing 21 Jump Street.
But I digress, so I am going to again recount my love of take-offs. The shear insanity of the physics involved in making a giant cylindrical school bus airborne never ceases to amaze me. It starts off with what’s essentially a controlled explosion of jet fuel which propels the plane, much like a Deloreon to a pre-determined speed that’s fast enough to keep the plane moving while the entire front section lifts into the air. So you (or in this case me) the passenger actually feel a slight dipping sensation before the plane takes off because the front of the plane is in the air well before the rear.
The seat belt, ah the airplane seat belt, has now become even more useless. Say the plane were to slow itself enough during a crash that we all didn’t die instantly, well luckily for us we have these seat belts on, and this seat belt goes well with the other new safety feature on this particular airplane, a small television built into the back of the seats. Whereas without my seatbelt I could potentially fly into something soft, like a fat person (although not as likely in a plane filled with Asians) now with the seatbelt on I am guaranteed to smack my cranium straight into a television screen, or if I’m lucky just the tray table.
After the take off is over it’s time for the actual flight, snooze central, what I have discovered however, is that if you fall asleep chewing gum, your body will eventually stop chewing, and there’s going to be a lot of extra saliva left over, and since you’re sitting up, well gravity is going to tell that saliva were to go, your shirt. Listen, I learn these lessons so you all won’t have to. Swallow your gum when you hit cruising altitude. Luckily some of the passengers probably just thought it was a leak in the air conditioning system since craning their necks to the point where they could see my head would cause severe neck pain. It was kind of funny watching everyone stand on their seats to put their carry-ons in the overhead compartment.
So awash a sea of Japanese folk returning home, I was curious to see who I would end up sitting next to, and as it turns out, I ended up sitting next to a Mexican born New Yorker. A gal named Miryam who I have nothing negative to report on, although even if I did there’s a good chance she’s reading this out of the corner of her eye so I won’t write it anyway. She’s flying out to Osaka to sell wedding plan designs to Japanese hotels. Apparently the Japanese can’t quite flaunt their cash and conspicuously consume as well as we can. I’ll make a note to add chrome and bling into my lesson plans. Damn if she didn’t buy the most comfortable looking plane pillow in the world too, it practically took an Alaskan mountain to wake her up for lunch.
The flight is 14 hours long, I assume it’s mostly because the flight moves in a parabolic trajectory to the god damned North Pole and then south again to Japan. Although I can’t complain too much because the views over Canada and Alaska were phenomenal, it’s good to have a reminder of what the world was like before it was a Wal-Mart parking lot. Especially on the way to an island more densely populated than Jersey.
Everything else today has been kind of a blur, I think single run-on sentence will encapsulate it pretty well; we landed in Tokyo and I scrambled to get my luggage, paid thirty dollars for a bus to the other airport in Tokyo I had to get to for my next flight, sat next to a Japanese dude who was a 4 year army vet that I could probably snap like a tooth pick, got on the next plane, checked all three bags without a single comment or extra penny added, stupid American Airlines, got on the flight to Hiroshima, fell asleep, woke up as we were landing with a little note that said you missed dinner, bought a bus ticket, got on another bus for about 45 minutes to get to a train station, bought a train ticket, got on the train, got off at Tokuyama (in Shunan City) got picked up by the husband of the head of the school, got dropped off at my new apartment, and here I sit after 24 straight hours of traveling, 2 planes, 2 buses, 1 train, almost two hundred dollars in bus and train tickets and no geishas later. Tomorrow of course is another day.

Wheat Out