We’re finally in Japan now. It seems very late for me, but it is still relatively early locally. It is about 8 PM Japan time and 6 AM Arkansas time and my internal clock is desperately struggling to catch up.

Today started very early, around 4 AM. I didn’t get to bed until 11 PM because I was trying to pack in everything at the last minute, so I was nice and tired for the trip out. Fortunately, it made it very easy to sleep on the plane, screaming babies, turbulence and all.

We didn’t have any problems getting to XNA in Highfill, Arkansas. Everybody showed up with plenty of time to catch our flight. We were well stocked for the trip. Everybody had brought enough food to avoid the fate of those people in that movie “Alive” for a long time. The biggest hit was from Sergio who brought bread and cheese from his native Spain. He also packed wine and olive oil in his luggage. If you’re going to travel, make sure it is with someone from Spain.

Our flight plan was from XNA to Dallas to LAX to Kansai near Osaka, Japan, a 22 hour trip. I didn’t realize how busy XNA was that early. There seemed to be a lot of business traffic and probably a lot of it was from Wal-Mart and other vendors. When a couple of the other guys in the group and I were talking about our job prospects after we get back, we realized there were probably a lot of people that knew about some good jobs and we wanted to yell out, “Hey, we got some hot off the presses MBA students here. Top grade stuff! Anybody want a business card?” We stopped short from doing so. But, there is always the trip back. Maybe I’ll bribe a flight attendant to hand out my resume to everyone on the flight back.

I learned an interesting fact about one of the members of our group: Kelli can sleep anywhere any time on an airplane. She can sleep when we’re on the ground waiting, she can sleep as the plane takes off, with or without noisy babies, with or without the inflight TV on. I was very impressed.

I had a bit of a scare at Dallas. Since we have to keep this journal, I was going to break out my laptop and do a little blogging. I’ve got this neat little program called PDANet that lets me use the IP stack on my Treo to connect to the Internet. First I had trouble getting PDANet to work. It has always been a little quirky, but the new version I downloaded only worked for a few seconds, and I was only able to get a few dozen KB of data down from the Internet. I never got the program working for the entire trip out. I was pretty unhappy about that. When I tried to plug my laptop in to one of the power jacks at the airport, nothing happened. I thought that my power cord was dead, just what I needed at the start of a long trip away from home. Then I tried my cell phone recharger and it didn’t work either, so that made me think it was the power jack and not my gear, which is what it eventually turned out to be.

The trip from LA to Japan was best summarized by Nhan when he announced after we got off the plane, “My butt hurts.” Our group didn’t have assigned seating at the start of our trip, so we were split up and seated in pairs around the plane. Other than that, the trip was OK. The food was pretty good; we had a bit of sushi, naturally. I think I slept about 2/3’s of the trip when I should have gotten up and moved around, so of course, my butt hurt when I got up. We’ll see if all that sleep was a good idea in a couple of hours when it is time for bed again.

I also sat beside a young lady who was traveling to Okinawa. She told me how beautiful and lush it was there. I never really thought about Okinawa in that context. I always thought of the Okinawa as where many of Japanese martial arts come from. Now, I want to go there to see the sights as well as train.
So, now we are on our way from Osaka to Kyoto by train. I’ve traveled by train before in Europe and found it a pretty good way to travel. It’s not as hectic and confining as air travel (you don’t have to stay buckled in your seat for most of the trip), and you don’t have to do the work of driving a car so you can watch the world go by or think or read or write your blog.

Japan is different from some of the other countries I’ve traveled in, for example Germany. For one thing, the cities are huge! If you look at a map, it is mostly Osaka from Kansai Airport to Kyoto. My wife and I lived in Vienna for a year and it was a big place with a couple of million people, but Osaka seemed to go on forever. And although it was around 8 PM, things seemed relatively deserted. There were, of course, people at the various train stops, but down on the streets below the train track, there were very few people or cars. It was Tuesday night, and I don’t know if people were still at work or the various stores were closed so there was no reason to go out or everyone had turned in for the night. It seemed very strange.

Osaka also seemed uniformly modern. Most of the buildings seemed new, not too many quaint older houses or buildings like Germany.

Finally, I want to thank whoever suggested bringing your own handkerchief or tissue. It was an extremely useful suggestion since bathrooms don’t always provide paper towels. Remember that next time you’re at an American rest stop.

Tommorrow, Kinkakuji and Ryoanji and maybe, an Internet connection.