Anyway had to leave the house at 5.3o in the morning on Monday the 2nd bit early for me but had a flight booked from Birmingham to Tokyo, via Zurich so needs must. I was Flying on Swiss Air, never flown with these guys before but it was pretty good flight as I'm not the world best flyer, I'm almost in the camp of if we were meant to fly we should have wings, but that's not going to happen.
Like i say pretty good flight although when the plane landed at Zurich i thought we might have lost part of the undercarriage as he came down a bit hard to say the least, but we were down and the first leg over.
Had about an hour in the airport before i caught my next flight, just about enough time to navigate my way to the next terminal and get through security, don't think you'd want much less time than this to catch an interconnecting flight. The airport was efficient though, which is pretty much what i would have expect from the Swiss, ran like clockwork must be all the watches.
Couple of photos below of the airport and my connecting flight.
Arrived in Tokyo at about 8am the next day, first thing was to get through security and pick up my bags, security was pretty easy just took quite along time. Japans another place you have to give you finger prints and have your photo took, wonder how long it will be before they do this in the UK. Couple of shots below of Narita airport, it was 8-o'clock in the morning so not a lot of people around.
Anyway got through no problem, got my bags and out into the terminal, took a bit of time to orientate my self as i had to find where to get the Train to Utsunomiya well first of all i had to get some cash.
Decided to send my bags direct to the hotel by courier to save lugging them all around and on the train, no fun when your in a foreign county and you don't really know where your going. The baggage deliver service was great cost me about 3000Yen about 15quid was well worth it and in typical Japanese style well organised.
After doing this off i trot to find out how to get the train, i can't speak a word of Japanese so i was relying on someone speaking a little English. Actually that's a lie i can speak a few words but you don't get very far on hello, goodbye, Kamikaze, Karate and Banzai.
Found the train ticket counter and no problem and found i could actually speak a couple of other words, Utsunomiya and Shinkansen which is where I'm going and the high speed train that takes you there. So with my very limited Japanese and their English no problem got the tickets three of them and off i went to the train station. Haven't been on a train for year in the UK, the girls had explained to me that i used all the tickets at the turnstile, it gave me them all back. When i caught to next train i used all the tickets again but it kept one and just gave me two back as I'd completed the first leg of the journey and so on at each stage until you were at your destination and it kept all the tickets. Very good i though if it all worked but i needn't have worried everything was ultra efficient and even for stupid first time users like me there was staff at the turnstiles to help it you needed it and i did for the first one. The other thing about the trains and the tickets was that all the seats were pre-booked which was great as you were guaranteed a seat.
So on the train i get and start my journey to Utsunomiya and to my hotel, more to follow.
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