2015 Japan

I flew as direct as I could manage this time. I have had enough of 5 hour naps on airport seats.

As direct as I could without changing days was Jetstar via the Gold Coast.

Jetstar are not a very good airline FWIW.

I mean, granted I'm not at the bottom of the ocean with no-one having the faintest idea where the plane went, but still.

Things I like about Jetstar:

1) They're almost as cheap as the people who lose planes.

2) The windows on their plane:

They have a variable tint LCD film type thing going on. 

Things I don't like:

Practically everything else. Particularly the part where they took three goes to assign me a seat at check in (including taking a boarding pass they printed 5 seconds ago back off me) before then moving me once we had boarded the plane and I had sat down in my assigned seat.

I'm not a fan of them price gouging for every little service they provide either. I refuse to pay for inflight entertainment, so I watched TV on my laptop until the battery ran out (the plane had no power points, to further add to their litany of crimes). I was then left with trying to sleep on an airplane with no room to move, or watching American Sniper on the screen of the guy next to me with no sound.

He watched it about 4 times over the course of the flight, I think. Probably because he kept falling asleep and missing huge chunks of it, but it might be because Jetstar charge you per film you want to watch. I don't know, but I wouldn't put it past them.

Anyway, I got the gist of it.

There's a patriotic guy in a bar, and he's reminiscing about the time he was a sniper in iraq, and how he had to fight evil sniper. He shoots some dudes (and a nun) and evil sniper shoots some dudes. Then one day evil sniper shoots a marine electrician, and good sniper checks his goggles and even though evil sniper's distance level is over 9000! he takes the shot anyway and kills him. Then there's a gun battle on the roof, and good sniper is winning until the mummy attacks them. Maybe the evil sniper was the mummy, and shooting him activated his sand powers. Like I said, no sound. Anyway, it looks bad for them, but then an armored car arrives to rescue him and he goes to see his wife. Who, by the way, someone should tell about the invention of voicemail, because when she can't get hold of him on the phone she bursts into tears like it's the end of the world, and it happens a lot.

Anyway, this is my cursed hotel room.
It's on the thirteenth floor, and the Australian dollar amount on my credit card statement
is for $666 exactly. A rarity in foreign currency exchanges in my experience.

 Anyway, it's not all bad. There's a 7-eleven across the road from my hotel. Oh wait it is, it's closed for renovations.

and possibly the first cherry blossoms of the trip.

 As a filthy tourist 7-elevens are the lifeblood of your stay. They are about the only place any of your credit cards will work, and therefore their ATMs are your only source of paper money, which you will be using a lot of because, there's hardly anywhere your credit cards will work.

Also, they sell a much better range of random crap than 7-elevens at home do.

for instance, here is the wine section, right next to the instant noodle section.

A friend from work asked me to grab him some rice crackers of a particular sort from a nearby department store, so I wandered over to check it out this afternoon.

$65 worth of market fresh strawberries anyone?

It's time to go mobile...

 Anyway, about an hour and half of scouring the stupid food floor of the department store, with staff I approached shouting  "Gaijin wa kyodaidearu" before running off (I presume to find me the rice crackers, but they seemed to have as much trouble as I did, since none returned with any) and doing so many laps of the store I nearly overdosed on the free sample of prawn crackers they were handing out. I finally showed a small woman handing out samples the photo I had of the empty wrapper. She ducked off down an aisle and quickly returned with a bag of the crackers with a helpful  "Watashi o kizutsukeru ikenai" and I paid for them and left.

they came in a nice wrapper and bag.

I hope they were worth an hour and a half of my time!

Which leads me neatly to my next post.