Goin’ Tokyo

When Pi Chi went to Minnesota, her flight home was overbooked and the airline asked her to take the next day’s flight. This happened to us in Amsterdam, and KLM gave us a nice wad of cash and a room close enough to the city for me to show Pi Chi one or two of the sights in the very limited time we had. This was a good experience for her so she did not hesitate when Northwest asked her to spend an extra night in Minneapolis. The airline booked her a small room at an airport hotel and gave her a travel voucher for future flights with Northwest. The hotel was nowhere near the city and too far away from the food she likes for her comfort. The travel voucher was not quite as good as a wad of cash for obvious reasons, one of the least of which is that Northwest flies directly to only two cities from an airport two hours away from our house by train. There is an airport about the same distance from us as the train station, but Northwest does not go there.

We found that the voucher was enough for two tickets to either Tokyo or Bangkok, the only two cities available. We could fly elsewhere, but then we would have to connect with another airline and the prices went much higher. I have been to Thailand repeatedly and Pi Chi has been to Japan almost as much. We already went to Tokyo together once, but only for a very brief stay. I could easily show her around Bangkok since I consider myself familiar with that city in the way foreign tourists do while the locals laugh at our ignorance. Given the choice, we opted for Tokyo since it is a much more expensive town than Bangkok and if we have any kind of discount we might as well use it at the place it is needed most.

After reading everything I could find on Northwest’s website about their travel vouchers I felt that using it would be a simple operation. I was as wrong as a Republican who thinks they represent family values. Despite everything I had read to the contrary, their travel vouchers can only be used for the person in whose name it is printed. If you have a voucher for $100 and want to buy two tickets for $50 each, the voucher can only be used toward one of those tickets. According to the website, the remaining $50 is lost.

Being us, we decided that one free ticket was better than nothing. We would go ahead and pay for the other one and fall right into the airline’s web. The punishment for making Pi Chi miss her return flight from Minnesota was that the airline sold an extra ticket to Tokyo they would have never otherwise sold. KLM foolishly gives away cash, which customers can easily spend on frivolous things like food and shelter. Northwest is clearly better at making money.

Yet Northwest Airlines is no more. They are now part of Delta. This change took place while we were trying to book our flights. When I tried to use the travel voucher online, their website was under redecoration from one company to another. What was available to me would not recognize the voucher. This forced me to do something I had thus far had the rapturous pleasure of avoiding for years. I had to call an American customer service office.

Where I live, companies are backward. If you need to talk to someone, you talk to that person. If your electricity is off, you call the person who can turn it back on. If you run out of gas for the stove, you call the guy who brings a new tank. For more complicated situations, you let Pi Chi make the calls. I have not been on hold in years.

After listening to recorded messages about how important my call is for a good 20 minutes, I was greeted by a Northwest customer service operative. I asked him if he was a real person. He assured me that he was and I took him at voice value. During our conversation he explained that the voucher could only be used for one ticket, regardless of the balance, and I explained why that sucked fat ones. He laughed knowingly when I made some derisive comment about working for a soulless corporation and said that he was impressed by my “good English”. At that point he knew where I was calling from and where I wanted to fly from and to. I told him that I watched a lot of American television growing up. I never bothered to mention where I had watched these shows. How is that any of his business. 

With an electronic confirmation number from a website that was closing and a company that was no longer in business, I went ahead and found us a hotel. Pi Chi and I have been to Tokyo together. She has been there by herself. Neither of us has seen the Imperial Palace. This is like going to New Jersey without visiting a shopping mall or Paris without the Eiffel Tower. The Imperial Palace is the only prominent part of Tokyo that has never been bombed by Americans. It is an important historical, cultural and architectural part of Japan. And it looks pretty in pictures. So I booked the cheapest hotel I could find within walking distance. It was very cheap by any standards. Alarmingly cheap by Tokyo standards. I assumed there would be something wrong with it, but had no intention of spending much time in the room anyway.

When you fly to most countries, they want your passport to be valid for at least six months. Mine expires in five. Renewing it before the trip would have been the smart thing to do. But Pi Chi’s travel voucher was about to expire and if my passport was still in the mail I would not be able to go anywhere. I decided Japan would let me in anyway since I have always had such good luck with uniformed officials in the past. As usual, the immigration clerks dutifully stamped my passport and sent me on my way while I had to wait for them to question Pi Chi and her motives. Because of the seal on my passport, I can go almost anywhere in the world without suspicion. Because of the seal on her passport, every country Pi Chi wants to enter questions her at length. The only revenge she gets is when we get home. If there are 1000 foreigners and 10 locals waiting to pass immigration, they will still open more lines for the locals. While I wait behind 1000 foreigners to enter the country where I live, she waits behind one or two of her own kind.

Since our flight to Tokyo left very early in the morning (by my standards) we took the train to the airport the day before and spent the night at a sex motel. Pi Chi booked the hotel. Not because it was a sex motel but because it was close to the airport and cheap. It was cheap because it was cheap. We have stayed at other sex motels and none were as bad as this.  

It is worth mentioning that Chinese sex motels are nothing like the dirty cardboard smoking rooms you rent in Hollywood while cruising for hookers or those tiny pay-by-the-minute closet-rooms the $5 Thai hookers take you to. Or so I am told. Chinese sex motels are where businessmen take their “little wives” since so many business meetings are met at the usual corporate hotels. They are also some of the few places in the country you will ever find your own private parking space. Not that that mattered to us on this trip.

What I hate the most about traveling pretty much anywhere is all the hurry up and wait. You wake up early to wait around for whatever vehicle takes you to the airport. If it is a train, you hurry to the station and buy the tickets to wait around for the train. At the airport you hurry to the check in line where you wait. After you check in you wait in the security line so they can take away your 12 ounces of liquid. And it is a good thing they do. There is no telling what damage I can do with a can of Pepsi and a tube of toothpaste. Appropriately, the airlines have us put our tiny bottles of lotions in plastic bags, thus thwarting our MacGyver abilities to turn soap into an atomic bomb. Without those little plastic bags we would all be doomed. I hope the evildoers never realize that items placed in plastic bags can be removed.

If you and your lethal shampoo make it through security, you have to wait at immigration. This is one of my favorite lines for reasons you would know if you were paying attention. After immigration, you get to wait some more, even if your flight actually leaves on time. When they call your row (or “zone” lately), you hurry up and wait in the line to get on the plane. After you hurry on to the plane, you wait for the plane to hurry up and wait in line to take off. Once airborne, you have no control over the hurrying, but you do get to wait. And when it lands you get to repeat the entire process in reverse.

I decided long ago not to let all of that bother me. The journey is half of the trip and sometimes the most adventurous part. I keep telling myself that while I wait in line between the screaming toddler who thinks everything within a 10 meter radius is his own personal playground and the sweaty fat guy behind me who thinks sneezing is a distance competition. I assume someday that I will believe it.

On my first trip to Japan I took a taxi from the airport to the hotel. If there is one rule about visiting Japan it is that you never take a taxi anywhere as long as there is some other mode of transportation. Japanese taxis are clean, efficient, and have those cool passenger doors that the driver can open automatically. But they are apparently the most expensive taxis in the world. A taxi ride in Thailand will cost you less than a bottle of any liquid that can be taken on a plane. A taxi ride in Japan will cost about as much as the flight to Japan.

On our first trip to Tokyo, Pi Chi and I took the hotel’s shuttle bus from the airport. It was free and easy, but time consuming. I think it took a good 15 years to get from the airport to our hotel. We might still be on that bus and everything I have experienced since is a dream.

For this trip we took the train to the hotel. It costs slightly more than a bus, but takes far less time. The Japanese were kind enough to build their international airport nowhere near their capital. No matter how you get into the city, it will take at least an hour. The express train is a good option, but buying tickets from the machines is an exercise in futility. We found out the hard way that you need two tickets per person to get on the train. One ticket reserves your seat and the other allows you to ride the train. You cannot get on the train with only a reserved seat ticket, which makes me wonder what the point is in selling it individually. How does it benefit anyone to have a seat if they cannot get on the train? But since the Japanese are generally helpful people and the people at the station probably see this sort of thing all the time, a small woman in a shiny uniform took us to a nearby ticket machine and quickly pushed all the appropriate buttons to get us the appropriate tickets.

The express train into the city was quick and clean, but I still like Hong Kong’s airport express better. And you only need one ticket.