The next morning I boarded a flight for Tokyo. Flying standby again, upgraded to Business class. The flight was long, but fine. I watched the movie Elizabeth twice on the personal video monitor. I read. I listened to music. I wrote in my journal. I slept for about fifteen minutes.

Late afternoon arrival in Tokyo. Flight out to Seoul scheduled for 6pm. Except I got bumped. No room on the plane. The gate employees were frantic and didn’t want to deal with me. They said all of their other flights to Seoul were booked solid through the weekend. Left me standing there in an empty airport hub in need of lodging for the night and an alternative means of getting to Seoul.

I had planned to write in my journal about how 3 years prior, to the day, Dave and I had boarded a plane to Korea. It was the very first time I had flown over the Pacific and I did it with the knowledge that I was going to journey to the other side and live there for three years. I was sick with anxiety the entire flight - the entire thirteen hours from LA. This time I flew alone, returning "home" relaxed and excited. The connection in time is meaningful and I wanted to explore what it symbolizes to me. I didn’t get to do that, and I certainly didn’t arrive in Seoul on the same day we arrived three years before. It is still meaningful, but it’s no longer quite as symbolic. It’s almost as if there was an intervention to prevent that level of coincidence. I’d like to believe in that: It was not meant to be that I should arrive in Seoul on the same day twice.

So I didn’t. It was 6pm. The last flight to Seoul was gone. The ticketing counters were all closed. The airport, for all practical purposes, was deserted and trying to shoo out the remaining travelers so it could close for the night. It was only 6pm and I was furious. Japan is an awfully expensive country to get stranded in.

It took thirty minutes for my checked bag to convey in from the tarmac. A few minutes later I reserved a room at a nearby hotel with a shuttle that circled frequently to the airport. I withdrew yen from the cash machine. I ran upstairs to ticketing just to see if anything might be open, but it was all entirely shut down. It was 7pm.

That night, I lie on a bed in a Japanese hotel wearing the provided yukata and eating cup-udon, almond Pocky, and a Coke. I watched a Japanese comedy show for a little while before settling in on a young Clint Eastwood in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Then I slept until 4am, when jet lag and anxiety woke me. At 6am I went down to the hotel restaurant for my free breakfast, before catching the shuttle to the airport. On the way we stopped at another hotel to pick up other early flyers. A bunch of pork vendors from South Dakota piled into the shuttle in a cacophony of jokes and laughter. The man who sat down next to me said those other guys were too shy to sit next to me but he wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity. He told me all about the meat market in Asia, the best morsel of which was that American meat producers sell sub-FDA standard product to other countries at astoundingly high prices. I hadn’t thought of that before. Sounds like exporting meat is the way to go for that entire industry.

At the airport I bought a ticket on the first flight to Seoul, which was also the first flight of the day, leaving at 9:30am. Korean Air. Oof. One of the worst safety records in the world. The cost of the ticket was almost the same as flying one-way from Seattle to Seoul. Damn Japan. Hours to kill: I bought a miniature Tetris game and ate green tea ice cream. The new Terminal 1 at Narita is nearly completed and I wandered around the shops and marveled at the whizbang technology. Totally flat monitors displaying arrivals and departures. There were automated walkways that only moved when they sensed people approaching. It’s all very high tech and sleek.

Somehow, though I definitely purchased a cattle class ticket, my seat was in the Business class section. I rechecked my ticket and it said "economy" so I think they just stick people up in Business when they run out of the small seats. I was comfortable and I felt a little better about the cost of the ticket. But I was nervous flying on this airline. Dave told me on the phone the night before that Korean Air had just had another accident and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. We landed safely nevertheless, white-knuckled though I was.