Sayonara, NYC; Hello, Tokyo!

The journey of thousands upon thousands of miles began on a Wednesday morning in NYC (okay, the boroughs Queens and Brooklyn), where two ladies in their mid-twenties were set to embark upon an overseas trip. Vanessa and I met up at JFK airport at 10:30 AM for our 1:30 PM nonstop to Tokyo because goodness forbid there somehow be long lines for check-in and long security lines. Guess what? JFK was a ghost town. We zipped right through, at which point I realized that bringing both Etienne (my larger rolling suitcase) and Isaac (my new, smallish bright pink rolling suitcase) was not a good idea. (It's extremely WASPy to name suitcases, I know.) It's not easy to roll two rolling suitcases around. It proved to be quite the headache once we arrived in Tokyo. Here I am at JFK! Look, so fresh and bright-eyed.
Once checked and cleared, we settled into the Japan Airlines/Korean Air terminal, where food choices were scarce. We chowed down on pesto paninis, checked email, talked and discussed our itinerary. Around 1:15 we boarded our enormous double-decker plane, finding ourselves placed in the upper level where ECONOMY seats were located. There I found out that Isaac wouldn't fit in the overhead compartments (and why should it?) so I had to remove all necessary items and put them in our little storage compartment to the right. Vanessa had the window seat and I was sitting next to a father whose wife and kid and maybe foreign exchange student were in the opposite row.

Completely unsurprisingly, our plane was delayed getting out of JFK. At the front of the cabin there was a monitor which showed the view from the nose of the plane, which was cool during take-off. The safety demo was also amazing, as evidenced below:What IS that? A Twizzler??

V and I got up a lot during the 14-hour flight to stretch, pee and steal those amazing "crisps & crackers" snacks and jack chocolate from the business class areas. Movies were kind of a saving grace: I watched Iron Man twice, Kung Fu Panda four times, What Happens In Vegas almost twice and 21 almost three times. Despite earlier plans, I decided not to sleep or take any pharmaceuticals around 10:30 PM EDT. This was actually fairly easy because until we hit the International Date Line at approx. 11:25 PM EDT, we were chasing the sun, going back in time. This actually made me and V a little stir-crazy. It was NEVER going to get dark. Then BOOM we crossed the International Date Line and it was suddenly 12:25 PM on Thursday. We'd just lost 12/13 hours by flying west. It still trips me out.
Then we got to Narita Airport where we were greeted with so much organized chaos. After electronically finger-printing and photographing us at customs, we headed down down the escalators to the transit systems.
As per our friend Daryl's suggestion, we bought the JR Line (train) N'Ex ticket with the Suica (Tokyo Metro/subway) card package. After an hour train ride through the non-attractive rural Tokyo countryside in front of a very garrulous Alabama man, we got to Tokyo, where we hopped a cab (they drive on the left side!) to Akasaka TBS. Turns out that TBS is Tokyo Broadcast Station, home to zany talk and game shows. Daryl didn't live there, so after many attempts to try to find our way around, we finally just called him. He picked us up and took us to his phat amazing from-the-future apartment. His toilet is one of those that senses when you are near and opens its lid for you, warms the seat automatically, cleans your butt and other holes at the touch of a button and cleans itself. His shower is either a regular shower head or a rain shower and is an entire room that dries itself at the touch of a button. also, you can set the bathtub to fill up at a certain time and temperature and it will just do it automatically. You get into his apt building and room with the swipe of a card and all of his lights are motion-sensing.

Daryl took us to a local sushi place and ordered us a bunch of delicious savory dishes. Here's me giving V some sea urchin (which I ended up eating and not loving; I'll try anything once):