OMG OMG OMG OMG

Well my future loyal viewers do I have a few stories for you! Currently where I am it is March 22 and 1:41 in the AM. Where YOU are it is 11:41AM on the 21st. I am officially in the future.

So this entry is going to be extremely long because I experienced a lot of crazy stuff today. There are very few pictures to upload since my phone has yet been able to connect to any sort of WiFi...a bummer I know.

So my journey starts at my house in Houston when I wake up early and get ready only to learn that mother nature is about to open a can of whoop ass on Houston. I felt that mother nature can't hold me back so my father and I left the house without a care in the world about what the weather may bring.

So about 4 minutes later we end up getting stuck behind the longest train ever created. We left my house at 7:01am and did not get 3 miles from my house by 7:30 due to this ridiculously long, and extremely slow train. I have not gotten stuck behind a train in literally years. I almost forgot that trains still existed and railroad tracks weren't old ruins from a lost age. Well it turns out trains still exist and to make up for their scarcity they add a million cars onto them. So.Stupid.

So we bypass the train and continue on our journey across the city of Houston towards Hobby Airport. Well, had the train never showed up I doubt I would have seen any bad weather at all. But, the train did happen, and it happened so spectacularly that not only did the storm have the chance to catch up with us, it had the chance to get far enough ahead of us that most of our drive was through monsoon winds from hell. I remember vividly driving over an overpass and the wind picked up so much that it caused the rain to literally fall horizontally. Every car on the overpass had to stop for fear of veering into other lanes. At this EXACT moment the lovely weather service decided to tell us there was a tornado warning for central Harris County. At this point I thought "Well damn, nature doesn't want to me to leave the states SO BAD that it throws tornadoes at me. Well we showed mother nature up and eluded her vortexes of destruction and made it to the airport.

Upon arriving at the airport I went through all the security just fine, but when I got to my gate it showed that my flight had been delayed 15 minutes. No big deal. Mind you the flight was supposed to take off at 10:15...arrive at 11:00 which would allow me an hour and a half to make my international flight. Well 15 minutes goes by and I notice it has been delayed another 15 minutes. So now it is departing at 10:45 instead of 10:15. Still no big deal. We all get boarded on the plan by 11:00. I am STILL not worried. THE PLANE DOESN'T TAKE OFF UNTIL 11:55! Because of the weather it took the pilots an entire hour to download the new route they had to take. Now this made me think. If the pilots have to download the route information "for" the computer, they aren't technically pilots. If they let the plane fly itself the whole way and make sure nothing breaks, they are more like hardware supervisors. Silly stuff...anyway, long story short my plan arrives at 12:40, I beast my way to my gate and arrive at 12:45...the EXACT minute the plane was supposed to leave.
 

This flight was delayed until 1:30. I'm not entirely sure if this made me happy or irritated me further. That part of my day was a blur of emotions and running. I finally board this mega jet and discover that I have a window seat, as well as a free seat next to me to stretch out on, SCORE! The next 13 hours were blissfully peaceful and awesome. I was provided 3 delicious meals and was able to sleep for hours. Best flight ever.

My super jet arrives in Tokyo Narita and I get my first splash of Japanese culture. In a nutshell, everyone is super polite, super helpful, and super giggly when I try to speak Japanese to them. So here I am in a country that has too many crazy symbols in their grammar for me to read anything, but EVERY sign has English on it too! This makes it really easy for me to check my bag, get my new boarding pass, and find my new gate. My final flight to the area of Japan I will be living was not exciting at all. Everyone was Japanese, super polite, and super giggly at my attempts at their language. The flight attendants were AWESOME though, they gave me a menu with a lot of pictures and all I had to do was point at what I wanted. To make things even better, they did the same thing to everyone else around me, even though everyone around me could read the menu! Hahaha...awesome.

This is where the story gets interesting...seriously.

The problem is that after having to quickly reschedule my flight at the last minute, I ended up arriving a half day too early. I originally planned on just hanging out in the International section of the airport until I met up with the others in my party. Well there is a shuttle that takes people from the domestic terminal to the international terminal which takes about 15 minutes. When I get to the international terminal all the doors are closed and the lights are out. At this point I am simply thinking wtf. I hop back on the shuttle and go back to domestic to hang out there over night. IN THE 30 MINUTES I WAS GONE THEY LOCKED THAT UP TOO. So now I am stuck out in the 40 degree weather with nowhere to go and no idea how to get there.

I decided this was the ultimate moment to brush up on my Japanese speaking skills. I go over to the nearest cab driver and ask him where I can find a cheap hotel for the night. Somewhere in the translation he directs me to a 24 hour restaurant a few blocks from the airport that you can supposedly stay the night at for 500 yen, which is about 6 dollars. I'm thinking "hell yeah great deal!" Well it turns out that this 24 hour restaurant is just a restaurant and I was told I was not allowed to sleep at the tables. I ordered food anyway and enjoyed it. Then I explained my situation to my awesome waitress who seriously took the time to 1) call me a cab and 2) call a hotel securing me a room. This lady spoke absolutely no English, but my broken Japanese combined with my awesome sherades skills told her everything she needed to know. In what might have been 35 seconds a cab driver dressed in a tuxedo peeks his head in and bows to me and asks if I still want the taxi. He then proceeds to take all my bags down to the taxi while I paid my awesome waitress and thanked her a hundred times. My cab driver, who knew I didn't have a lot of yen, speeds through the city to my hotel in probably about a minute in a half making what would have been a $16 cab right about a $10 dollar cab ride.

After dropping me off this cab driver sets up a time to pick me up in the morning so he can take me back to the airport! I love the Japanese. So I then go into the hotel and secure a room. The concierge laughed at my Japanese more than anyone else and showed off her perfect English. I get my room key, go up to my room and spend the next 15 minutes trying to figure out how to turn on the damn lights! Turns out there is a holder for your room key near the door that activates all of lights. Nifty trick Japan, nifty trick.

I hope you enjoyed spending the last 45 minutes of your life reading this short story. Hope you enjoyed it because the best is yet to come! Once I figure out the cell phone situation I will upload more pictures!

Song of the day/night.