day zero

At the Calgary airport, my family, my counsellor and three of my close friends saw me off. The flight was over so fast, and then I had a two hour wait in Vancouver.

Before I even left the Vancouver airport (where there are by FAR more Japanese speaker pages than English ones) There was this little kid running around, I kept noticing him because he was in all lime green. I thought he was lost, he was miles from anyone, and then later at our gate I saw him with his dad talking about where he had gone in Japanese. If I was in an international airport at that age, my mom would have had me like tie to her leg. I guess Japan is just really safe.
The plane was serious business; let me tell you I’ve been on my share of planes, but I've only ever been to Canadian destinations and the north western US. This was very new for me.

I should add that my original flight plan was Calgary > Vancouver > Osaka > Sapporo
But THE DAY BEFORE I LEAVE Air Canada calls and tells me they're canceling the Osaka flight, instead I’m going to Tokyo, but my dad got me bumped up to first class for the trouble, so it went

Calgary > Vancouver > Tokyo Narita airport> Sapporo.
Now, I have extremely mixed feelings about first class air Canada. Maybe I'll make a list to save some time.
Good:

-HUGE seats, more leg room than anyone could ever need
- Three windows to myself
-The seat lies down like a bed all electrically

Now this is all exceptional, but

Bad:
- Everyone looks at you like, hey what is this kid doing up here with these fancy business men.
- Everything is glass and ceramic instead of plastic and you have to grab onto it when there is turbulence.

All the Japanese people want to sleep. If you want to look out the window for the whole 9 hours and 10 minutes, you're out of flippin luck. The stewardess will ask you to shut your window, and when you open later she will just walk up and shut it, and you will watch a bad movie. I did get a few glimpses of tundra though

Coming in to Tokyo was nuts. We we’re going through these 1000 foot tall clouds, and there must have been 5 other planes, so close to us, I guess it’s busier than in Calgary. Then I could see huge ships going out to sea, and miles and miles of industrial compounds and buildings.

Oh yea, I should say that when I got to the airport everyone was wearing like doctors sanitary masks. I guess just because we’re foreigners, but for a minute I thought there was like some outbreak and I was going to die. Especially when they made an announcement that anyone with flu like symptoms should report to some desk immediately.

Next I went to immigration. It all went smoothly despite the man knowing no English and being muffled behind his mask. I walked away and picked up my baggage, which came like first because I was first class priority. And I realized I didn’t have my boarding pass. I almost died on the spot, but I ran back up an escalator and there it was on the table I had set it down on. Close one. I actually got on a bus that took me to my plane, that was really different, and when the plane from Tokyo to Sapporo was loaded I was pretty much the only white person. After my two hour flight through a huge purple lightning storm, (which would have been more frightening if I could have kept my eyes open,) I picked up my luggage and went through a glass door into the main airport, and that’s when i really started to feel like I was in somewhere brutally and completely different from home.