Saturday, Feb 07 2026

I boarded the plane without incident and the entire plane right pretty much went by without incident as well. My plane to Tokyo had wheels up at 3:34 pm local time, and I had an aisle seat this time, but sadly the seat beside me wasn’t empty. A young Caucasian couple set down beside me, and the guy in the middle must have had bladders and knees of steel as he didn’t stand up to stretch or visit the washroom even once in the entire nine hour flight.

One of the options when booking the ticket with ANA was a choice of in-flight meals, and like the last time I did this, I ordered Seafood Meal for both meals. This turned out to be only one hot meal — although this was an Air Canada meal, it was an ANA led flight and I guess they only give one hot meal for their 9 hour intercontinental flights. For all I dislike both Air Canada and Westjet, I believe both of them do two hot meals plus breakfast. At least the last time I remember sitting on those flights.

Also, my seat’s USB port wasn’t working for charging, yet again, but at least the flight attendant tried to fix this by rebooting the seat software. That didn’t work, so she offered to move me to a different nearby seat and I said it was fine, but she at least let me use that other empty seat’s USB port to charge my phone instead, so that was nice. I’ve had broken USB ports before on planes where the answer was just a shrug and oh well from the flight attendant.

Our in-flight safety video was this Pokemon-themed one, which was neat even though I’m not a fan of those little critters. I actually recorded it as well but that one is better since it skips the plane noises in the background. I had a couple of naps on the plane, and when not napping I watched my first ever Detective Conan movie (which was both fun and weird) and a few other documentaries.

The seafood hot meal that I had looked like this:

And they gave out a gelato to everyone else about halfway through the meal:

The couple next to me got handed a laminated piece of paper to choose their meals from, so I asked that he held them up so that I could take a picture of those too:

I thought at the time that this represented “meal 1” and “meal 2” for the flight, but upon reviewing the pictures back in the hotel much later on, I see that one of the two was for the Vancouver -> Tokyo leg and the other one was for the Tokyo -> Vancouver leg. How weird.

They also gave out a snack mix that looked like this:

and later on while stretching my legs, I saw an entire take-as-you-like snack bar too:

Why yes, I did help myself to a little bit. They did give out a lot of drinks all in all, and I had tomato juice (my usual) x2, apple juice, Japanese lemonade, green tea, and black tea at various points in the flight.

They then gave out the “second meal” two hours or so before landing, and this one was just the disappointing breakfast, though it came in a nice box:

The “seafood option” was just a lousy tuna bread instead of a lousy whatever other bread the normal people had.

I did end up tearing off and keeping the plane hole in the box cover for my scrapbook though, and that wasn’t the only souvenir i ended up with. Near the end of the trip, an attendant was giving out souvenirs in the form of sweets in a box that looked like this:

But look, there were postcards at the top of the box too! I got to keep one. In addition, I had inquired near the start of the flight whether they had packs of poker cards that I could request or not, as I know I had done that sort of thing while I was much younger. Not every airline has them (anymore), but some apparently still do. And ANA was one of them! Completely free too, I just had to ask for them:

That instantly forgave any any sort of bad blood over the hot meal related shenanigans.

We touched down in Tokyo at 5:57 pm, and I leisurely made my way out of Haneda Airport toward my accommodation for the night, Tokyo APA Hotel Keisei Narita Ekimae. This one was located next to Keisei-Narita Station, one stop over from Narita Airport, and this was important because my flight out of Tokyo to Sapporo was at 6:35 am the next day. This meant I had to catch the first train from Keisei-Narita the next morning, which arrives at 5:02 am and then reaches the airport at 5:08 am.

Although the timing still sounded distressingly tight, it being a domestic flight and me arriving on the first train very early on meant that checking in would not take very long, and because the plan was to send my large suitcase via transport company instead of bringing it myself, this also meant that I could skip the baggage check-in counter tomorrow as well.

This was not to be though, as I was faced with this sign while standing in front of the luggage transport companies:

Oh.. ‘about” 5 days. I wouldn’t even be in my Sapporo hotel anymore by then. That was Yamato’s (local) freight timetable due to all the snow hammering Japan. JAL ABC (local) next to it, whose counter was manned by those two guys in the top right of the picture, didn’t mention the snow at all but said that their delivery to Sapporo would take “about 3 days”. Also too risky, since my hotel stay there was only for 3 days.

In the end, I decided not to use them. I bought a cheap SIM card from the Bic Camera store located next to those two counters, then lugged my big bag (and all the little ones) all the way to the hotel myself. I had actully bought a check-in luggage allowance on my budget flight from Tokyo to Sapporo anyway before getting the idea to try to ship it, so that part wasn’t a huge concern. There was another concern linked to this but it makes more sense in the context of tomorrow’s post so I’ll leave the explanation for that one.

The hotel at Keisei-Narita, one train ride away, was about two and a half hours away from Haneda Airport by train. Before leaving, I had run my first day itinerary by Gemini with, among others, a note that I liked to collect paper ephemera, and it had helpfully taught me about a way to keep a paper ticket as a souvenir. On Jah‘s suggestion, I then took that reply and also ran it by ChatGPT. Gemini had noted that there was a direct train all the way there from Haneda to Keisei-Narita, ChatGPT then pointed it out as an error because they were on different lines, and Gemini then rebuttaled saying that it was NOT an error, and that the right train would just take you there through line switches using a system called Chokutsu Unten. And there is a graphic on that Wikipedia page, the “Asakusa Line route” map, that actually shows the connection, and my route would have me starting up at the Haneda Airport node and take the fastest train that “flowed down” the list.

That was in theory, and then Gemini had told me (and ChatGPT did not rebuttal it) that I could also buy a paper ticket from Haneda to Narita and just have the attendant at the final station do a void stamp so that I could keep the ticket and have a nice stamp (many stations apparently have unique stamps) on it as well. Also in theory. Nothing I’d ever tried before, but that’s one of the strengths of the bots, pointing out things (in theory) that I didn’t know about within my specific constraints.

Anyway, in reality, this is how it went. Yes, the through-services train existed and worked as advertised, however the specific train that I needed to go all the way there was not nearly the fastest route because I would have had to wait some time — an hour or something — for that train to even arrive. So instead, I took a rapid train that went through all the nodes but ended at the second-last one, Keisei Takasago on that diagram, and then did a separate local train from Keisei Takasago to Keisei Narita.

I did buy the ticket to Narita from Haneda, but the hallucinating bots had mentioned that I would have a voided ticket with the start location and end location on it, which was kinda sorta partially true in the end. My ticket looked like this:

The ticket itself was an easy buy from the ticket vending machine — I just selected English, picked my end station (Keisei Narita), and paid for it following the prompts. I thought I had the wrong ticket and was a bit worried about that for most of the trip though, because the ticket didn’t actually say Keisei Narita on it, but instead said Oshiage (押上) on it, with an arrow next to it. I still don’t know how to read that ticket exactly. The price I paid, 1,410 yen, is posted up top in smaller font, and I guess the 800 yen has to do with the fee to the intermediary stop, Oshiage? With the arrow indicating that it’s a through-services train or something?

Either way, Keisei-Narita was not written on the ticket at all. Except until the very end, when the kind station operator stamped the it with the mukou-in (lit. void stamp), which so happened to contain the name of the station, itself. That’s the 京成成田 at the bottom. So it kinda worked as the bots said it would? Kinda sorta?

Anyway, it was only -2°C at the time in Tokyo but it felt colder than that nonetheless, perhaps due to my tiredness or something. I had been indoors all of the time, except for a waiting period between trains at Keisei Takasago, but I was really feeling it once I came out at Keisei Narita. There was wet snow falling eveywhere too, although the ground itself was not slippery. My hotel itself was practically next to the station, but I did have to go down four flights of stairs to reach it, two of them uncovered from the elements, and I was shivering by the time I reached the hotel.

In addition, I had been stubborn about not bringing a water bottle at all on this trip from my Edmonton home, since any water would just be tossed by the airport people anyway and I knew I was going to buy several bottles of tea and so on on my trip. So, while I could always drink at the airport and on the plane, there were periods of time, like when i was on the train and when I was strolling away from water coolers, where I just didn’t have access to water. My throat had began to hurt a little bit from being parched, though I think this started on the plane itself somehow, and got worse during my two hour journey on the train.

So I was glad when I reached the hotel room and there was a bottle of water waiting for me. The hotel I was staying at was the APA Hotel Keisei Narita Ekimae, in the city of Narita that both the station and the airport were named after, and my 8th-floor room looked like this:

It was small, but I expected this as it’s not the first APA hotel that I’ve stayed at. I was looking forward to a hot shower, but I needed to source food first, so I went out and back up through Keisei-Narita, then out its front exit where I believe people were doing last-minute canvassing for the Japanese election taking place tomorrow (自由民主党 is the ruling party, LDP, in Japanese).

I walked along the streets and ended up at a restaurant serving Japanese-style Chinese food:

This restaurant was called Hidakaya, and I ordered a funnily named Bakudan Itame from them — Itame is stir-fried, and bakudan is explosion. Stir-fried explosion! I ordered a side of extra large rice with it, for an additional 70 yen, and it came out to a total of 900 yen.

That extra little bowl up to the top left was salted seaweed, I believe. Or something that tasted like that anyway. I really enjoyed this meal, it satiated my hunger and made me feel warm again. I was also here about half an hour before they closed, so a little bit after I had ordered, two of the staff came by separately mumbling something about “Last Order” and I understood they meant that the orders currently cooking were all they were going to be making for the night before they closed.

After this, I strolled over to the nearby JR Narita station despite the cold, picked up a station stamp in my book from there, and then wandered back home, entering a couple of FamilyMarts along the way to thaw out. By the time I got back and took a nice, warm shower, it was north of 11:30 pm, and I had to be at the station nice and early to catch the 5:02 am train, so I had set my alarm to 4:00 am. The shower had gotten rid of some of my chills from the cold outside, but not totally, and there was still the lump in my throat that I was worried about. I wanted to work on my blog, but was too tired and dozed off for a bit. This didn’t last long though, and I woke up sometime between 1 and 2 am, and then puttered around half-heartedly on the blog for a bit. 4:00 am, then 4:30 am, came around, and I packed up and self-checked out of the hotel before heading to the train station.