10 hours in Japan

So, I skipped around a bit and my last Elephant Nature Park post was actually at the very end of my trip. I'm backtracking to the very beginning now.

Where my trip began:

6/19/2015-6/21/2015

A series of [what I originally considered] unfortunate events led me to the most incredible layover of my life in Narita, Japan. 

After the pilot turned our airplane around while en route to Tokyo from Chicago (because something "critical" broke....?!), I had a God-awful experience trying to get a hotel for the night. Long story short, American Airlines is the absolute worst. Anyways,  I "slept" on a Chicago airport bench and ended up meeting someone who was in the same situation as me. Chase and I immediately bonded over how much we hated AA and made the best of a pretty bad situation. We ate super-stale Dunkin Donuts in the lonely food court, and ended up basically telling each other our life stories since we essentially had 8 hours to chat. It ended up being a really fun night. 

One of the better takes from our delusional 5 a.m. photo shoot.

I met another friend, Linh, because she sat next to me on the plane from Chicago to Tokyo. Small world in that we were both eventually bound for Hanoi, Vietnam. She taught me a good bit of Vietnamese on the plane!

So, after the second try, we finally made it to Tokyo. But thanks to the Chicago flight being delayed a casual 16 hours, I got to Japan about 10 hours before my new flight to Hanoi was departing. So Karn (another girl I met on the eternal layover) and I went exploring.

Bye bye, airport.

Sogo Reido Hydrangea Festival

I won't even begin to explain how difficult it was for us to order this soba. Or figure out what it was or how to eat it. The Japanese language may be completely impossible to understand if you've never attempted learning it, but at least the people are incredibly friendly, helpful and accommodating. 

You dip the noodles into the soy sauce. Then they give you hot water––which we thought was tea––and you're supposed to pour it into the soy sauce and continue drinking it until it's gone. It's a soup sort of situation. We would have had NO idea if the kind woman eating behind us didn't keep getting up to come check on us. We must have looked so helpless in this extremely non-touristic town.

Kiwi juice. Yum! 

This lady and I only spoke about 5 words of each other's languages and yet had so many laughs together on this flight. She would point at things and say them in Japanese and I did the same in English. She kept saying, "you young, I old," and then cracking up. 

"Niji." "Rainbow."

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After 56 hours of transit...I finally touched down in Vietnam. 

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