Day 1

Location: Tokyo, Japan & Sapporo, Hokkaido
Weather: Mildly cold & pretty damned cold!
Author: Amy (the hardworking one)

Hi all! Welcome to our very first blog and the very first post of the blog!

We left Perth, Australia at around 11pm and arrived at Narita Airport, Tokyo, Japan at 9am the following day. The flight was very tiring as can be expected from long flight, small seats and lousy food. I managed to sleep a bit so wasn't too tired but Chrissie only caught maybe 2 hours of sleep.

After breakfast, we gave up trying to sleep and just talked and sat around staring into space. I played with Chrissie's ebook which is actually quite fun! The games, I mean. As Danny can guess, I was playing all the puzzle games. I don't like games where things chase me, see, so can only play puzzle games or bubble games.

Here's us in the plane. Chrissie is 200% against me putting up this picture and I will never hear the end of it but here it is anyway. We probably look really tired so forgive the bags under the eyes.

Chris and me in Qantas plane on our way to Tokyo, Japan

Around this time, I thought maybe I should take more pictures for the blog so started taking pics outside the window. There was actually a potentially good picture but I was too late! It would have been a picture of a round 'rainbow' with the shadow of the plane in it. Probably a result of the light reflecting off the plane onto the clouds.

Anyhoo, I took this instead. A picture of the Japan coastline, marking when we actually 'entered' Japan. (I suspect that there will be lots of pics early on in our adventure but will eventually dwindle off so appreciate it while you can!)

Japan coastline

Then we slowly made our way to Haneda airport where we took the next flight with JAL to Sapporo, Hokkaido. We had to kill 2 hours waiting for the flight so walked around a bit. Not too much to see but took some pics just to put in the blog.

There was this toy place with really a lot of toys, called Juveniland. There was a giant robot in there reaching up to the ceiling of the shop. And lots of cute toys....

Giant robot in the shop. We were a bit shy about taking this picture cause we didn't know if it would have been ok to take pics of the merchandise.


Tiny cute little robots on display


Fluoroscent flowers that slowly swaaaaays left and right

The flight to Sapporo was pretty empty. We had a huuuuge plane! Don't know why they had to use such a big plane for so few people.

Sapporo from the sky is really beautiful because it is blanketed by white snow over huge fields.

Sapporo from air (near coastline)

We were pretty tired by this time so all we wanted to do was get to the hotel quickly and rest. The main train station we had to transit at was very busy. But we persevered and made our way through the crowds anyway. Danny, you would have gotten claustrophobic and refused to walk further.

We had to walk to our hotel from the train station and the roads were very slippery because of the ice. I was veeeeery slow and Chris had to wait for me quite a lot as I was lagging behind. It was pretty cold. I think it was zero degrees or thereabouts.

Got to the hotel without any incidents. Too tired to go far for dinner so went to 7-11 and got bentos. Danny would have liked to go... I took pictures of my bento just to show Danny cause he loooooves the bentos in the convenience stores in Japan. I reckon kombi stores are his best friends!


My bento and snacks (for just in case I got the munchies)

Planned our next days events and then went to sleep. Did I mention that our hotel room is very small? Chrissie took pics so she may show it on her posts. She wanted me to mention that bedroom slippers are provided.... for maybe 3 metres of carpet. You would have put them on, taken 2 steps and would need to take them off already to either go to the bathroom, bed or out the door.

Pretty much end of Day 1.