Narita Scribbles

So this is Day One, and I'm stuck here at Narita Airport in Tokyo. It's a four hour transit, which is immensely annoying because it means that we'll be forced to walk around and spend money on things we don't really need, like US$3 for half an hour's worth of internet access, food, and Japanese porn. It doesn't help that things are pretty damned overpriced. This also means that we get to walk all over the terminal and explore it completely, something which I hadn't done before. It's beautiful, and fucking huge.

The smoking rooms are great compared to those in Hong Kong. I mean, there are automatic doors and decent ventilation and all that, and it actually looks semi-welcoming. In Hong Kong, you step in, and you enter this perpetually smoke-drenched corner of the universe. You don't even have to light up, you just need to breathe.

Maybe it's because I'm still recovering from my illness, but the descent into Narita just now was by far the worst I'd ever experienced in my life. As the plane descended, I began to feel this excrutiating pain in my sinuses, especially right above my right eye. Seriously, it felt like someone was using a rusty hand drill to bore right into my eyeball and socket. And then of course I began to tear and sneeze uncontrollably and all that. Ugh. I hope this doesn't happen again in San Francisco.

It's six in the morning. Outside the Arrival Hall at Changi Airport, a line of cabs sit patiently along the sidewalk. A cabbie gets out of his taxi and lights up. He sits on a metal railing. I step out of the air-conditioned comfort of the terminal. I light up too. Our eyes meet. There is a flicker of acknowledgement. We nod in greeting. For a moment, we are connected, fellow smokers puffing our lives away in the still of the morning. But only for that moment. Then we look away and try to ignore each other as we finish our cigarettes in stony silence.

The timer says I have seven minutes left. Time to end this. Stay tuned for the next post, which will be from Stanford.