Thursday, November 17, 2016

Day 2 - LAX to HND

Actually Day 3 since I lost Day 2 when I crossed the International Date Line but I will keep this blog to my person days.

Wow!  What a huge difference in airline service!  As I mentioned in my last post, the flight attendants were rude and bossy.  My experience with ANA was the exact opposite. I flew to LAX without boarding passes for my next two flights because of the airline change and when I was greeted st the counter, I was expecting the typical American service. I was wrong!  I was greeted by a Japanese team that flawlessly and fluidly switched back and forth between English and Japanese that I wasn't sure which language was their first language.  The desk attendant then looked at me and my original assigned seat and just got on the phone without any prompting from me.  She was getting me an upgrade to more leg room. I am in her debt as possibly the largest person on the flight (99% of the passengers where likely Japanese) and she recognized that I wouldn't have been comfortable in my original seat.  A 12 hour flight isn't comfortable no matter what and the additional leg room was greatly appreciated.




The flight was great.  I slept about 5 hours and watched several movies for the remainder. One problem though - I was thinking about a beer and sushi in Tokyo the entire flight. We landed shortly after 5 am and I had to wait until 6am for the restaurants to open.  The crazy part is that I chose spicy shrimp ramen over sushi when I had been dreaming about sushi for days!



Now I am waiting for my flight to Hanoi where I meet Heather and our real vacation can begin.  I can't wait.  I also need to start using talk to text to record more detail for this blog.  Practice makes perfect and right now I just want to post enough to make my memories grow when I read these posts in the future.

Oh yeah - one last thing - please don't squat on the toilet seat.  As an American this might seem obvious but most of the developing world still uses squat toilets.  As a good friend of mine suggests, there is a coffee table book to be written about the toilets of the world.



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