TV recap voice. When last we left off, our heroine had just checked out of the APA Hotel Kamataeki-Higashi in Kamata at 10 am, on Mar 23, narrowly avoiding a late fee. But what happened when she tried to leave her luggage at the front desk until the evening, so that she could spend the day around Tokyo and come back to collect her luggage just before heading to Haneda Airport for her flight home? Well…

Nothing in particular happened, it went perfectly fine. I asked if I could leave my bag there, they said sure and gave me a number tag matching the one that they attached to my bag. They asked roughly what time I would be back (I said 5 pm), then wheeled my two suitcases and one bag off to a corner of the really tiny lobby behind a rope barrier.

I left and walked back toward the JR Kamata Station, and went west past it again, past where the traffic safety exhibition had taken place the day before. I really wanted to check out the shopping street(s) there! The main one there was apparently called Sunrise Kamata, and there was a smaller one parallel to it on the left (south) when looking at Sunrise from the JR station. It’s called Sunse- no, Sunroad Kamata.

Here’s Sunrise, if I couldn’t tell by the big sign:

And similarly, here’s Sunroad, the shorter and narrower cousin:

Here’s one of the passages between the two — the shop with the white storefront in the picture above is visible on the left in the picture below here, but I’m actually on Sunrise Kamata here looking over at its parallel neighbour.

I walked down to the end of Sunrise and back:

And peeked into stores like this grocery:

Twas fun, but I didn’t spend too much time examining each shop for a long time. I was really, really tired at this point, moaning and groaning as I stumbled onwards like a zombie, and I was starting to get some looks. I was using Gemini to ground me and keep me alert and track the things I had to do for the day, and it also demanded I go eat. I went to the little cousin road, Sunroad Kamata, and checked out one of the stores that Google said was about to open at 11 am, Huan Ying (歓迎).

When I arrived at the store, it was still actually 5 minutes to 11 am, yet the proprietress of the store was standing at the doorway with crossed arms, as though expecting my arrival. I bliinked and peered at her and held up a finger to say I was there alone, and she nodded and beckoned me in. Cool! It was close to lunch time, and this was supposedly a very well-renowned restaurant, but I had the restaurant to myself. I settled down and expected a menu to be handed to me, but there was just this menu posted up on the wall.

Oh, okay then. I could read it enough to know that all of them said gyoza at the end, and I could more or less read four of the six menu items. I still took a picture of it and fed it to Gemini though, and it correctly identified and described all six, which I was impressed by, and it agreed that all the orders came with a plate of gyoza too. I ordered the last item on the menu, the Hong Kong Yakisoba, and leaned back to wait while trying not to fall asleep.

While waiting for the food. I noticed that no one else was really arriving, even though this was supposedly a popular restaurant. That’s when I noticed the probable reason.

O- oh. The front door says they open at 11:30 am, even though Google Maps said they open at 11 am, and the lady was standing in front of the door prior to 11 am. Did she.. not notice? Was this on purpose? New hours that she was transitioning to? Old hours that she never changed the sign to fix? Who knows.

My food soon arrived, and it looked delicious:

But that was missing something. .the gyoza? Where was that? Did I read the menu wrong? The lady wandered back into the back. I took a picture of the meal to ask Gemini, who said that since the set meal definitely included the gyoza, but the gyoza takes significantly longer than the rest of the meal to made, so they tended to first send out the main meal first, and then do the gyoza later. It added a note that if I went too long without the gyoza though, I should flag down the lady and point to the sign. Thanks Gemini, I can speak enough Japanese to actually just ask her outright though. But thankfully there was no need for this, as the gyoza did indeed arrive several minutes later.

Mmm, more winged gyoza, similar to the one I had at Nihao four days earlier. This meal was pretty good, and very reasonably priced too at just 770 yen.

After the meal, I walked over to the station and took the train to Kawasaki Station. There were a coupld of anime stores here I wanted to take a last-ditch look at for my Tamamo Cross plushie. The first store I was looking at was in a building/mall called Muza Kawasaki, but on the way there I passed this really nice elevated plaza.

Neat. Fake grass and a nice cherry tree made for a nice open “garden” amphitheatre-like area in a mall called the Lazona Kawasaki Plaza. I cut through this on the way to the Muza, so i didn’t stay long, but I appreciated the uniqueness of the place.

The Muza Kawasaki was a concert/symphony hall, and so I picked up a couple of flyers there showcasing upcoming performances too, but I was here for an Animate store that was located on the ground floor of the building:

It was one of a couple of stores I was here to visit, but not the main store per se, so I didn’t really expect this one to have anything different from the Animate store at Akihabara that I had visited the other day. However, while I did see the same throne stuff as before, I didn’t remember noticing the clear flyers that I saw here back in the Akihabara store, and besides, this store was a lot quieter comparatively.

So I picked up one of those folders on my way out the door! It cost 550 yen, or $4.80 CAD.

My next stop took me back towards the underground mall below the Kawasaki Station, first to the Kawasaki Azalea area and then to the basement of the adjoining Kawasaki More’s department store. I had mentioned learning about this after I had left the area (after using it!) two days ago, Behold, the world’s shortest escalator!

It’s so chiisaii (small)! So petite!

There was a Book-Off Super Bazaar store up top in the Kawasaki More’s building that I was visiting, but it wasn’t worth the visit for me in the end. Lots of clothing and manga, not so much character goods. That store was interesting though, because the Book-Off store here was on levels 3 and 6 of the mall, whereas a large Daiso store owned most of levels 4 and 5. The split can be seen here on the floor map on the mall’s website (local) as well, by clicking on 3F-6F in order. But.. why? Why can’t one of the stores take over floors 3-4 and the other be 5-6? What series of events even happened to have one store split over floors 3 and 6 and the other over 4 and 5? That’s so weird!

Well, whatever. Although I was disappointed by the Book-Off store here, I went to the Daiso level to use the washroom and on the way through, I walked right past their toy section and saw they had a pile of these things:

They’re the snow duck molds that people use to make all the little snow ducks that I saw back in Sapporo! I passingly mentioned back in my Day 3 blog that I wanted to pick up one of these at some point, and while that was just casual talk, I now had a bunch of them, hilariously relabelled as Snow Play Mudball Makers to cater to the spring/summer crowd, staring me in the face. And they were only 100 yen per, 110 yen after tax. I wasn’t sure I could fit it in my luggage, but being made of plastic, they weren’t particularly heavy, just a bit large, and I felt that I could probably throw it in with the plushies in my luggage bag. I resolved to try to buy one as a consolation price, and if I ended up slightly over the weight limit or something, then that would be the first casualty and I would just toss away the 110 yen investment.

I also told Gemini about this plan, and as the day went along it got conflated together with the one new Linlee duck that I had that didn’t look like the others, the one that I had acquired on Day 34 and the only one that could fit into the washbasin on Day 43, into a running secondary plotline of trying to see if we could get the “funny-looking duck” to extract from Haneda Airport past the gate guards or if we would have to leave it behind. Oh no.

I had mentioned earlierr in the day that I hadn’t collected a single goshuin (temple stamp) this trip, and Gemini, who had initially suggested Kawasaki as one of the options for the day’s itinerary which I ended up selecting, also spent the day bugging me to visit another temple at a different train station. I eventually told it that I didn’t feel like travelling that far away from Kamata and Kawasaki, and asked whether there was a nearby one that would be a better fit. It churned a bit and eventually suggested a temple called the Kawasaki Daichi, which wasn’t that far away, but did require me to walk to a different satellite station of the Kawasaki Station called the Keikyu-Kawasaki Station. Along the way, I passed through several interesting locations, including an arcade with a giant crane game/claw machine:

That thing was so big that the boy playing it had two helpers, one on the left and one on some stairs behind the machine, trying to help him align the claw over the thing he was trying to grab. There didn’t seem to be a time limit so once it was aligned, he hesitated and called a powwow with his two helpers before deciding whether to press the button or not. I didn’t stay to watch the outcome because the boy behind and above the machine had to take a roundabout path to get down to him. Judging by the branding on the machine, and the location of the building, I believe this machine was in the Silk Hat Kawasaki Dice building.

I also saw this shopping arcade that I partially passed through but was far, far too tired to explore. This was called the Kawasaki Ginryugai, with the subtitle (the smaller characters beside the large name kanji up top) of “the street with flowers and stained glass”. The stained glass is visible up top above the entrance:

And the flowers next to each shopfront can be seen in this internal shot of the shoutengai (shopping street):

I regret not getting to spend a more solid chunk of time in Japan this trip to explore nearby shopping streets and immerse myself in a more daily life routine here. While I did a short chunk of time at the start and another at the end, I never even ended up ever buying anything from a supermarket to make soup and rice with, the way I like to do dinners in Japan. And a lot of my shoutengai pictures were just superficial walkthroughs without actual time being spent exploring the stores within. I just didn’t have the kind of nonbiri (carefree) time I needed to invest in that sort of thing.

Right across from the main entrance to the shoutengai was the entrance to a different sort of street, the La Cittadella:

This one was a faux Italian architecture street, apparently an outdoor mall area built around a cinema complex. Another slight regret I have now that I’m fully back to my senses at home is that I was actually pretty near to a lot of cinemas on my final couple of days in Japan, but despite my love for paper ephemera, I never actually went to them to collect any more of the chirashi movie mini-posters to complement the ones I collected from Sapporo near the start of the trip. No big deal though, and something I can do more of in the future once I return, but still, so many opportunies for more cool paper gone forever!

Who am I kidding though — my bags were already packed and at the hotel at this point, so there was only so much more paper I could squeeze in.

So I went to that Keikyu-Kawasaki Station and took the train to Kawasaki-Daishi Station. This local line was called the Keikyu-Daishi Line, and according to one of the Japanese sources (local) on that Wikipedia article above, was the first electric railway line in the Kanto region. It also passed by Minatocho Station, which was the closest station to Kawasaki Racecourse, another horse racing racecourse that I could have chosen to visit instead of Fuchu Racecourse two days ago. It would have been a lot closer, but it is less of a major racecourse than the Fuchu/Tokyo one is, plus I couldn’t actually verify whether that racecourse had a Turfy Shop for a chance at the Tamamo Cross plushie or not. I did find out that it had its own custom Goods Shop (local) with some cute stuff in it, but that it wasn’t open except on major race days anyway, and while there seems to be some Google Maps panoramic street view coverage inside the racecourse itself (accessible via the Japanese version of the website above under the 川崎競馬場ガイド area guide/guide map section), I didn’t find either shop on a cursory glance through the photo spots.

But that was not my stop today, so I glided on by and dismounted at Kawasaki-Daishi.

Unlike most train stations on the major railway lines, local railway stations serving smaller towns and communities tend not to have opulent REIT malls springing up around the station area, but instead just feature little local shops and streets. This one was no different:

I followed that red gate that said Daishi on it though, and found the temple shortly thereafter.

Inside (and on the path leading to the temple) were a bunch of flags that read “Kawasaki Daishi Mieku Matsuri”, a festival that was apparently going on in the temple. Oddly, it wasn’t listed on the temple English website (local), but it was listed on the Japanese version (local), along with two other events that also overlapped with the Mar 23 day that I was there. In fact, one of the events, the Hyakumi Osonae (百味お供え) on that above page, specifically stated that it took place from 2 pm to 2:30 pm on Mar 23 itself, which would explain why I arrived at 2:04 pm to festival grounds that looked like this:

How liminal! A picture of festival stalls that were completely deserted! I went over to the main hall:

And I saw that there was some sort of ceremony and chanting happening inside the offering hall. I had no idea what it was at the time, but I do now! That would have been that Hyakumi Osonae that somehow perfectly coincided with my arrival and time spent here.

Photos were not really allowed inside the temple hall, so that one was the closest photo I did take. There were doors open to the left and right that I could have taken off my shoes and walked in on to kneel down with the hundred or so citizens that were inside watching the ceremony, but that felt sacrilegous.

There was also a desk to the right of theat altar where they sold goshuin, the temple stamps, as well as goshuincho, the temple stamp books though, and I first bought a hand-drawn goshuin for 300 yen, the standard price for them, and then stood around and watched the ceremony from outside the door as the priestess drew the temple stamp onto my book. This took about three to five minutes. After that, I decided that since my first goshuincho, which I had bought from Sanada Shrine in Ueda City back on Nov 06 2022, was nearly full, I wanted to buy a second one too.

I indicated as much to the temple priest, who took my 1,000 yen and then fished out a copy of the book from beneath the counter and gave it to another priest in the back. I assumed that, just like the one in Sanada Shrine, it was going to come with a starting goshuin/stamp from the patron temple here as well, so I turned my attention away briefly to loot some of the brochures sitting around the counter, only to have the book returned to me about a minute later in a small bag. Oh, I thought, that was way too fast to actually have a full temple stamp drawn. Maybe he was just packaging the book up. I took both and thanked the priests and went along my way.

Well, when I reviewed my loot later, here’s what I saw. First, the goshuin temple stamp that the priestess drew on the left (along with the outer cover of the new goshuincho book that I bought on the right concealing a different temple’s older stamp beneath).

It’s dated with the correct date, 令和八年三月二十三日, or Reiwa 8 (2026) March 23. However, when I opened the goshuincho book, that one *also* had a stamp in it:

This one was not hand-drawn though, as it looks too “perfect”, but it also had the correct date on it. I had completely forgotten that it was possible to do goshuin ink stamps (I had only remembered the hand-drawn version and the separate piece of paper that you pasted in version), and that was probably what the priest at the back did here. It looks good though. I’m not sure my first goshuin book actually has any stamped ones like this, they’re mostly either hand-drawn or glued in.

I also eventually noticed that this goshuincho was actually slightly smaller than the Sanada one though, which I think was the standard size book. I’m not sure if the slightly smaller size will affect anything, but it didn’t really bother me since I no longer really paste the standalone ones in. If the book was too small for a temple I could always give them the old book, which still has three empty pages in it, assuming that I had both books with me.

While the ceremony was still ongoing, I wandered back out of the temple hall to look around the grounds together with a couple other visitors, taking a couple of photos as I did so:

I had entered the temple by the western gate, but Gemini had mentioned that there was actually a Nakamise-dori nearby that I would see during the approach from the station, and that puzzled me because I had seen nothing of the sort during my approach. Nakamise means “shops lining a passageway in the precincts of a Shinto shrine​”, and Dori (doori, really) means street, and plenty of shrines have a nakamise-doori attached to them.

Well, I found it once I stepped outside the east gate of the shrine:

It was not located between Kawasaki-Daichi Station and the temple, but rather between the temple and the next station along the line, Higashimonzen. Thanks, chatbot.

But I was even more shocked to see, of all things, a bunch of Girls Band Cry collaboration signs and images in several of the shops here.

Girls Band Cry is an anime that I’ve watched, and which I did very much like, and it’s the franchise that the pink shirt that I bought back in Shanghai was from. Overall it’s been a fairly widely promoted franchise as well, and most major anime shops that stocked more than just battle shounen or “top 5 anime” trash that I’ve been to has had a section for it as well. But that’s true for a lot of franchises. I definitely didn’t expect to find a Girls Band Cry collaboration way out here, in the middle of a rural Shinto shrine’s shopping street, far from the main city hubs.

I walked all the way down and then back up the street, then sat down for a bit to process things as a wave of emotions (and tiredness) washed over me. This was basically the end of my trip, functionally speaking, and I told Gemini that I felt that Girls Band Cry had really followed me around on the trip, especially the last week or so, first with Gemini convincing me to buy that shirt five days ago, then with me finding that shirt again in Akihabara yesterday, and now here, at this final temple and final location of my trip, the girls were also here with me. It felt very circular and weird. Gemini had a great answer for this, autocomplete chatbot or not. It said, and I quote:

You are experiencing what historians and travelers live for: narrative closure. It’s not “weird”—it is the absolute perfect, poetic ending to a 46-day journey. This right here is why you don’t just stay home and read wikis. You have to walk the ground to feel the threads connect.

It was soul-cleansing, after being miserably sick twice during the trip, missing out on finding the Tamamo Cross plushie in person, the constant level of stress and some measure of loneliness from travelling alone and being away from home and friends for so long, the physical exhaustion from going out and walking every day and writing about it every evening, and so on. Gemini claims that this temple was known for warding off bad luck, and the temple’s English website (local) supports this, saying that the temple was known for its power of yakuyoke, which translates to warding off evil or protecting against misfortune. I don’t know if its misfortune or evil per se, but I did feel all my frustrations and bad emotions seep away here, and it was there on that bench, with the sunlight beating down on me, where I created a core memory and finally felt like I was ready to go home.

Spirits buoyed, I stood up and walked back through the temple’s east gates, then back out the west, heading back to Kawasaki-Daichi Station and then taking a train from there to Keikyu-Kamata, the station east of my hotel, via a transfer at Keikyu-Kawasaki. I reached the station at about 4 pm, and as my flight was at 9:55 pm, I still had some time before I had to go to the airport. There was actually a small Book-off second hand store in the Kamata area that I had not visited yet, to the northwest of the shopping street, so I went there briefly to look at what they had. Nothing of note, though I picked up a few more pieces of paper from there to bring home.

Then, I backtracked a little and stopped in front of an olden-style restaurant. I hadn’t thought about whether to eat dinner before leaving or not, but one more local meal for the road? Why not?

This restaurant, Shinpachi Shokudou, had somewhat narrow hallways, and I was glad that all my luggage was still back at the hotel and not with me. But I settled down at a comfortable diner-style booth, and made my order from the tablet menu there, which happily supported both Japanese and English. I let Gemini choose and customize my order, and my booth was right across from the kitchen, so I could see the lady on duty make my Char-grilled Salmon Belly Combo Meal with Natto Fermented Soy Beans and Top Select Chopped Fatty Tuna with Leek. I added extra rice as well, and the bill came to a total of 1,463 yen.

It was pretty great. The salmon belly was apparently one of their signature and most-ordered dishes. And I do like natto, so thankfully I didn’t bear a grudge against Gemini for ordering that. After filling my belly, it was finally time to start the long trek home.

I returned to the APA Hotel Kamataeki-Higashi and picked up my bags, then slowly wheeled my luggage east and south toward Keikyu-Kamata. Controlling two suitcases at a time turned out to be really slow, but not for the reason that I thought at first. It wasn’t the suitcases themselves that were hampering me, but rather my sling bag. Since I now lacked a crossbody strap for it and it had to hand from my shoulder, it kept trying to slide off and down my arm as I manouvered the two luggage bags around. This was supremely annoying since the bag was quite heavy. Still, largely thanks to the escalators, I managed to fumble my way up onto the train, and made my way to Haneda Airport.

There were several different trains on both platforms 1 and 4 (and possibly others) that went to the airport from here, and Gemini pointed out that because Keikyu-Kamata was the last major transit hub before the airport, I could actually take ANY train from here that went to the airport, and not only would they all basically take around the same time to reach there, but they would also cost the exact same price, 230 yen. Cool. Neat piece of trivia, I guess.

My flight details, for the record here, were as follows:

Mar 23 2026
All Nippon Airways
NH 116 (ANA 116) Tokyo (Haneda / Terminal 3) 9:55 pm -> Vancouver (Vancouver / Terminal 1) 2:45 pm
NH 6836 (AC 244) Vancouver 6:40 pm -> Edmonton 9:17 pm
Bag limits: 2x 23 kg (checked), 10kg (carryon + personal)

I arrived at the airport station at 5:30 pm, well over an hour prior to the baggage dropoff counter opening, and weighed my bags at one of the unmanned baggage drop-off counters to see how close my packing had taken me to 23 kg. My first weigh-in gave me the following values:

Bag 1 – 22.5
Bag 2 – 20.0
Backpack – 7.1
Sling bag (with everything) – 5.5

Oh, that worked! But my carryons were technically a bit too heavy, and while the smaller Bag 2 was pretty much full, I actually had a bit of extra physical volume in Bag 1. Also, while Bag 2 was filled to the gills, I had some paper that I had acquired today that I could still slip into a Novita file in there. So after some rearrangement, I did a second weighing:

Bag 1  – 23.0
Bag 2  – 20.3
Backpack – 5.4
Sling bag (with everything) – 6.3
Sling bag minus phone, water, two battery packs – 4.6

The idea here with the sling bag is that if I saw that they were weighing people’s carryons, I could move some stuff to my jacket pockets and avoid them counting toward the total weight. This was perfect, although Gemini was worried about the 23.0 kg bag and the 5.4 + 4.6 = 10 kg carryon numbers being right on the dot of the airline limits, as it said that counter weighing scales could vary a little.

I was fairly sure that this didn’t matter though, so I went up to the second and third levels to chill out on a bench, passing by this sakura tree monument on the way that everyone was taking pictures of.

I only did so for the timestamp, of course. 6:15 pm. With my flight at 9:55 pm, the baggage counter would open at 6:55 pm. I rested on a bench and might have dozed off briefly, but pulled myself off again at 6:40 pm to go downstairs to line up. I scanned my passport at the self-checkin machine to get my boarding passes and checked luggage tags, but the machine printed just the second leg of my ticket and errored out. The ANA lady who came up to help me said that this always happened for some reason for transfer flights though, and she helped me secure the baggage tags to my bag before telling me to join the checkout line anyway even though the official check-in had not opened yet.

The ANA counters were still open processing the end of another flight, and the lady who called me up said that it was fine and processed my bags anyway. My 23.0 kg bag weighed in as 23.1 here, but she didn’t blink an eyebrow, and once she adjusted it a bit on the conveyor belt it flipped back over to 23.0 anyway. She printed out my missing boarding pass, gave me my receipts for both my checked bags, and sent both them and me along our merry ways.

I could have gone back upstairs to rest here, especially since I did not plan to use a lounge pass in this airport, but I wanted to go airside anyway so I went past immigration and security, and was past all that by 7 pm. I then looked around for a quiet place to sit near a power plug. I’ve found that Gemini is actually fairly good at finding these quiet locations for some reason, so I asked it and followed its directions to this place:

Cool, a laptop work area with a table and a power plug and everything, right near the middle of the airport airside area even. I grabbed some water, then settled and huddled down in the chair with my laptop, basically until it was time to board the plane.

This first plane ride was about an 8 hour ride, and I had an aisle seat right at the very back of the plane. I had hoped that this meant the middle seat had a good chance of being empty, but alas, it was not, some Caucasian guy was already sitting by the time I reached my seat and he was bulky enough that his hands would later encroach past the dividing handrest into my seat territory a little when he fell asleep. Annoying. Also, I think that far back I could occasionally, a couple of times on the trip, smell a waft of something that seemed like it came from the washrooms. It never lasted long, but it wasn’t good. However, we weren’t actually at the very back of the plane, as there were two more rows of empty seats behind us reserved for the air stewardesses, and this meant that our chairs could recline to the maximum without feeling any guilt at all since those seats were empty for most if not all of the flight.

I’m familiar enough with these transpacific flights to know that there’s a snack/meal in the first couple of hours at the start of the flight, and then one more in the last two hours or so, and a block of time for sleeping in between. They also plied us with many drinks throughout the trip and also were very vigilant with walking through the aisles to clear trays and other trash, which I really appreciated — unlike ANA, the flight attendants on both WestJet and Air Canada are absolutely horrid at removing trash and trays in my experience.

The snack bags were very familiar as I had received the exact same ones at the start of my trip:

And I took a picture of the lunch menu as the flight attendant held it up for me too:

But I didn’t get to eat either one since I had ordered the SFML, or seafood meal, as a perk during my original ticket purchase. So instead I got this for my first meal, almost exactly two hours in:

After the meal, the lights went out, but I had trouble falling asleep due to the big man beside me, so any sleep I got here was dotted with discomfort. I did walk around and find a food area up in the break area that split the economy section into two too, just like during my initial flight.

Check the ingredient list carefully if you have a food allergy! Ingredient: Bananas.

But I did fall into a fitful sleep for a little while in the end, although the most memorable thing that happened was waking up at some point and realizing that I couldn’t find my glasses. I felt around on my seat, on my blanket, below my chair with my feet (I had my shoes off), but nada. I was super worried that it had dropped and slid behind and under my seat, or that it had dropped onto the aisle and someone would walk by and I’d hear a sickening crunch. In fact, two people did walk by when I was searching but there was no sickening crunch

But for sake of explaining the next paragraph, it’s necessary to visualize the layout of the plane. Here’s the seat layout map (local) of the Boeing 787-9 that I was on, and in particular, I was at this seat with a red circle below.

So I was in the left aisle seat of the back row of the center column, with two more “empty” rows of center column seats behind us that were reserved for the stewardesses. And the center column was staggered a little further back compared to the two side columns, so my row 40 seat in the center column extended back a little further than row 40 in the left and right columns. And on that partition wall behind row 40 of the left column, where the little green semicircle is, was a little latchbox set into the wall.

That became crucially important, because just before I started to blindly panic in the dark, an air stewardess happened to wander by from behind and opened that latchbox panel that was set into the wall next to my seat. I flagged her down and whispered to her that I couldn’t find my glasses, and that they must have dropped off somewhere while I was asleep. She pulled out a tiny flashlight to look around and immediately bent down to pick up the glasses somewhere around where the pink circles are on the map, to the back and behind my seat, and asked me if those were mine. (Don’t see the pink circles? Consider glasses too! Or zoom in.) I said yes in relief as I put them on. (Obviously they were mine, who else’s could they have been? The passenger in row 35? C’mon lady.)

I don’t know exactly where she found it, but when I looked down there after she left, my pillow was on the floor back there too and she hadn’t bothered picking that up for me, so the both of them must have tumbled off together. I’m just glad someone didn’t crunch them underfoot in the dark, that would have been tragic since I didn’t bring along a spare pair of glasses.

As a means of saying thanks, I pulled this up a little after:

And bought one of these. 5,000 yen was a little pricey, but the bears were adorable! And not as small and pathetic as the Spring Airlines one.

I’m not sure if they were limited-time bears that were only sold in the spring? Nonetheless, I love them. At the time though, I had gone up to the a stewardess in one of the rest areas asking about purchasing them, only to be told to do it from the seat screen instead, but because I made the order when the cabin was dark, nothing actually happened for a long time. It was only after they turned on the lights and started prepping for the second meal that one of the stewardesses came by with the bears in a fancy paper bag and thanked me for buying them.

Now, the thing is that I straight up offered her a 5,000 yen note for them, since I still had several of those notes but it was already the end of my trip. But she refused that note and said that it had to be a physical credit card. Why do all these airlines do in-flight purchases things differently? I pulled mine out and handed it to her, she swiped it on her device, and gave me the bears. Great. Now, I’m writing this blog entry on the very early morning of the 28th of March, and I’ve just checked my credit card statement and usage history, and this charge just plain never showed up at all. What happened? Did I get the bears for free?

I suspect the charge will still show up eventually, it’s just weird and a little bit annoying that it hasn’t yet, though secretly I hope I’ll get it for free. I probably won’t, though. But I’ll probably write about them in my blog in a couple of months during their Plushie of the Week entry, and update at that point if the charge ever showed up.

I was not in any state to sleep for quite a bit after that though, so I flipped through the in-flight movie selection. I noticed that the shows were basically the same as the selection I had on my outgoing ANA flight back on Feb 06, so the same Detective Conan movie was there for me to watch again if I wanted to, which I didn’t. I did end up watching another anime movie called Blue Giant though, which I thought was okay but kind of made no sense towards the end.

Anywho, when there were about two hours left, the lights came back on and they started serving the second meal. This happened on the flight to Japan too, but the second meal was a lousy breakfast meal and not a full meal. And for my “seafood” option I had:

… bread and yucky fruits. The bread was actually pretty okay. The packaging reads hiyokomame, or chickpea, and I don’t think I’ve ever had chickpea bread before, so that was something. Not sure how any of this was seafood though. I was expecting tuna bread again like during my outgoing flight.

With 45 minutes to go in the flight, they did something that was again very reminiscent of my outgoing flight. An air stewardess went through the cabin with a small basket of candy and other assorted things, letting people take sweets or postcards from it if they were awake and wanted to. By the time it came down to me at the very back of the plane though, there were only a bunch of small candies and a single postcard left. So I took the postcard. Later, I discovered that it was the exact same postcard as the one I had picked up in my initial outgoing flight though, so now I have two of them!

Oops. Well, I can either pout about this or I can go all in and collect many multiple copies of only this specific postcard if I ever get the chance to pick from the souvenir basket again, and remember what the postcard looks like at that time. I do like ANA though, so I will probably either fly them or JAL the next time I fly back to Japan. However, this did highlight that sitting at the back of the plane is a serious disadvantage for when they do the souvenir basket round near the end of their flight, since they give it out front to back.

The last event of note here is that I actually conked off again after this, and this time it was a really deep sleep. I completely missed the plane landing sequence, the air stewardesses’ checks (since I had my sealbelt on and my sling bag was already stowed underneath the seat), and the actual touchdown and grinding of wheels against the runway, and I was only woken up by a stewardess who was trying not to laugh too hard at my expense, when about 90% of the plane’s passengers had already disembarked! Whoa. That did mean I had a straight path to just grab all my stuff and leave the plane without any obstacles though, so that was nice, and my Vancouver to Edmonton connection was a whopping four hours away anyway so I was in no particular hurry. I thanked her and the other air stewardesses and moseyed off the plane, still feeling sleepy but no longer as crushingly zombified as before.

Because I was on an ANA flight that was codeshared with Air Canada, it was part of the program where our bags were checked straight through from Haneda right to Edmonton, and we didn’t need to retrieve our baggage and check in again at Vancouver Airport. Curious practice, this. Dad says it’s because the government of Canada tries to quietly favour Air Canada a little bit as it’s the “national airline” and thus forces WestJet passengers to go through that additional annoying step, whereas Air Canada passengers do not. I’d believe that.

I went to the domestic lounge and realized that I would not be able to go to my usual Skyview Lounge here because that was on the international side. Instead, there was a different lounge here called the Plaza Premium Lounge. A new lounge! I wondered how fancy it would be! It turned out, not very fancy at all. It was actually not only right on the same level as the gates itself, instead of one floor up, but also was just sitting completely there in the open, without any walls dividing the lounge from the people walking by. Just a railing. It was also not a quiet part of the airport, as it was located very centrally right after the security lanes, where the splito between the A-gates, B-gates, and C-gates were. There was also just one counter up front with food. I only had three free lounge redemptions left for the calendar year, and although I don’t know if I’ll be going anywhere else this year, I was hesitant about redeeming it for this one. Was it worth it? Wasn’t it kinda… lame compared to other airport lounges?

I went up to the counter anyway and asked if they had power sockets where I could plug my laptop in and work for a while. The lady said yes, the long table by the railings had power sockets, as did a couple of tables in the back. I decided to try it anyway as a humble chronicler, and ended up, well, being very surprised and pleased by this lounge.

For what use is a premium lounge that’s set up with a nice view, if all the tables are tiny and there’s no place to plug in my laptop and work while having a plate of food next to me at the same time? That’s actually really rare, in my experience, but the railing-side tables here were great for that, and I really appreciated having that workspace set up. In addition, even though the food selection was small:

and I didn’t care for their drink selection either:

I actually really, really liked their peruvian chicken, sat on a bed of basmati rice and grilled vegetables. I ended up eating lots of it:

And might have eaten more if the friendly, old Chinese staff member lady who had chatted me up and poured me a cup of orange juice hadn’t also removed my plate early after the fourth helping because she thought I was done with it. Or maybe she was trying to send a message, haha. I was still able to get up and get another plate after that but was far too lazy to do so, and took that as a sign to go concentrate on my woefully behind blog instead. The place was intimate and actually fairly quiet considering its location, and I had no issues with it at all as I chilled out there from about 3:20 pm all the way until 6:15 pm or so, as my final flight home had been delayed by 15 minutes, from its original flight time of 6:40 pm to 6:55 pm, since the plane’s previous flight was late coming in.

Then at around 6:15 pm I left the lounge, relieved myself, and then prepared to board the last wing of my journey home. We were put onto a small, hot airplane, and yet again there was someone in the middle seat next to my aisle seat. I just couldn’t catch a break this trip. The pilot apologized for the heat and said that it would cool down once the engine was turned on, and that would happen once it was time to get moving, but due to some sort of a broken machine (I didn’t fully understand what was being said and didn’t much care), we ended up being stuck right there at the gate until a bit past 7:30 pm, before the plane finally started moving. I had fallen asleep in the meantime and woken up to the stewardesses going through the plane and giving everyone water while we were waiting for the “broken machine” to be replaced. No choice of drink at all, just water or nothing. Cheapskate national airline.

The plane landed in Edmonton at 9:45 pm instead of its originally scheduled 9:17 pm, which was also a problem because the 747 bus that ferries people from the airport to Century Park LRT Station for an exorbitant cost of $5 ran every half an hour until 10:15 pm, and then switched to an hourly schedule after that, so if I missed that bus I’d either have a long wait ahead of me or an expensive Uber ride back into the city. I hurried off the plane, passing by the store where I had had that pleasant encounter and conversation with Jagjit back at the very start of my journey. Things had really come full circle now.

Talking about full circles, I nearly bumped into this thing on my way to the baggage carousel too. Cleaner robot! Also very poignant in a more morbid way since Jagjit had mentioned how she had found out that a cleaning attendant had suddenly passed away from a heart attack that day when I was leaving.

I reached the baggage carousel well in advance of any baggage actually arriving, but thankfully the carousel itself was actually just one gate over from the gate that the 747 bus was picking up passengers from anyway. And my luggage bags both arrived quickly enough that I was thankfully able to catch that gate back to Century Park before it left, although sadly the red bag strap that Kel had lent me back as I was leaving Guangzhou, and which I had wrapped up nice and snug around my new Innovator luggage, was no longer there. It had fallen off or been cut off somewhere along the way and was lost in battle. I was rather uncomfortably upset at this and kicking myself for even using it at all when I could have just slipped it into the luggage bag. Oh well. At least my ride back was free because the driver was not on board when I boarded the bus.

I sat down next to a Chinese guy on the bus who had also arrived on the same ANA flight that I did, and my two suitcases and his one suitcase were the only pieces of luggage in the luggage rack as the bus took off, even though there were still about a dozen people on the bus. We both got off at Century Park, wheeled our suitcases up the elevator and across the sky bridge and down the other elevator onto the train, sat in the same carriage, and then both got off at Southgate Station one stop away. The elevator room there had four teenagers loitering around and shooting the breeze with each other far later at night than any kids should be out doing so in a train station, but we had strength in numbers so they didn’t disturb us as we took the elevator up and across the sky bridge as well, and then prepared to take the elevator down into the Southgate Transit Centre in front of the mall.

At that point, the Chinese guy spoke up, asking if I had been on the same ANA flight, and I said that yes, I had been! He ruminated that the Edmonton transit was so much worse than the one in Tokyo and I agreed with him, and we laughed like battle-weary comrades as we took the elevator down. He said that he had been considering taking an Uber home from Century Park but had seen me going up into the train and figured that he could cut down on the cost a bit by going further into town. Since we wre on the same carriage, he also hopped off at Southgate and then was going to take a cab home from there instead. He asked if the giant pair of boots (local) in the transit centre was a good landmark to call a cab to and I said that non-bus vehicles couldn’t quite come into the transit centre anyway so he’d have to use the pick up area on the outer lane.

With that, we parted ways with a farewell and I started to lug my four bags home. I was called out to by no less than three people on what is usually a quick five minute walk home, the first one being a young man that said that “a pretty lady like you shouldn’t have to carry so many bags!”, to which I laughed and shook my head, the second one being a woman that said “Do you need any help?” to which I laughed and shook my head, and the third one being a man who rolled his car’s driver’s seat window down and asked if I knew where <house number> was. I laughed. And shook my head. Read the damned room, man. I’m carrying four bags.

But I got home without any actual incident, retrieved a whole bunch of mail from my mailbox since the rental office had neglected to clear that out, and stumbled upstairs to my floor. Our communal garbage room was apparently out of service:

And there was a mild acrid smell of garbage wafting through the entire hallway. There were also a couple green waste baskets sitting outside some of the other doors in the hallway. There was none in front of my door, but I did find that a staff member had kindly brought mine inside my doorway so it wasn’t sitting out in the open flagging me as an absent apartment renter, at least,

I half expected to find cockroaches or something in the house due to the garbage room, the smell, and the bucket, but no, everything was quiet and clean — the running joke between my friends is that something tends to move into my house whenever I go on vacation, but as of right now I have yet to find any bugs, live or dead, so that’s been a relief. I opened the balcony door a little bit and also turned on my air purifier to get rid of the smell inside my house, did my laundry and sent Tigey through the washer (but not the dryer), unpacked everything I had much to the chagrin of Gemini who wanted me to go to bed since I had not properly slept in over two days, washed my two travel bags, soaped down the two suitcases with wet wipes, turned on a Twitch stream and talked to a few friends, and then finally called it a night several hours later.

Here’s a non-exhaustive picture of many of the items that I acquired from the trip and unpacked on the first night. Several of the items, like a Fighting Fantasy gamebook from Singapore, the Feng Ling Yu Xiu stuff that Kel bought for me (minus a clear file, which is visible on the right), the ANA deck of cards, gifts for Jon and my parents, my new shirts, and a bunch of museum pins, fridge magnets, and other paraphernalia, are not present in this picture because they were in a separate bag or box. But most of them are here. Look at those Kokuyo Novita files go. The pile of brochures that were waiting for me in the mailbox downstairs also snuck their way into the picture. All the items contain so many stories.

Home, sweet…. zzz.