Himeji Castle

Spent a fabulous day touring a castle with Jesimee and our friend, Will. I recommend this to any of my castle-loving friends, or to any of my camera/photo-loving friends. Well, the upload on photos is being SUPER slow, so I will add more later.

Size perspective of the entry gate door:

Sunday morning, to catch the 5:13 am airport shuttle, I awoke at 4:00 am. Early start to a very long day, and crossing so many time zones I would have to think about how many hours I actually ended up from waking up at the hotel till arriving in my apartment in Japan. Still kind of tired from all this, so thinking isn't necessarily on my list yet.

I met a nice lady from New York while waiting for the shuttle. This was the start of meeting interesting people all along the way. She teaches at a Catholic school and her college-age son has been on singing tours various places in the world. I don't know that she has much to remember me by other than that person who enjoyed listening to her, but so it is nice to do for people sometimes.

Check-in and passing through the security gate went quickly and without event. I remark on that only because it seems remarkable not to have any remarks on it...so many people have major stories even before getting to their plane, but all went simply and smoothly. It seemed almost dream-like but that was most likely because I was running on only a few hours of sleep.

I was unbelievably calm, considering that my last plane ride, probably 15 years ago or so, had been quite scary to me, in spite of my love of flying prior to that. I really thought I would never get on a plane again and had been quite determined about that stance. However, some things motivate one beyond one's fears, I have learned, and I felt amazingly peaceful and happy about doing this. No calming or breathing exercises or any of that stuff I had thought I would have to do to get myself to step on that plane...it just felt right. I didn't have a bit of nervousness at any point of the flying aspect at all once I arrived at the airport and throughout the duration of all the flights. I'm kind of in shock about that, actually. That has been a huge fear for a long time, and for it to just disappear seems unusual, but I'm glad of it.

Sitting by the window on the first flight, I got to see the amazingly beautiful descent to the Hawaiian airport. I love how you can see land formations under the water in many places.

The Hawaiian airport was much smaller than I expected. Nice to be able to exchange money there, walk around, buy some postcards to send to family, and wander over to the terminal.

The culture shock set in just a wee bit as I walked into the waiting area for the flight to Osaka and realized that of the couple hundred people there, that only about 3 or 4 of us were not Asian. I think my sense of adventure kicked in even more at this point. All the announcing for this flight in the airport was given in Japanese, even here at the Hawaiian airport. I could tell I wasn't in Kansas anymore...oh, wait! I haven't been to Kansas since I was 9 years old, so...

The only bummer, and only a slight one at that, was that I didn't have a window seat on this flight for picture-taking happiness. I loved all the guava juice I was served, we had two meals, both of which exceeded my expectations for airline food, and I discovered that postcards are difficult to write on when turbulence happens, which did each time I would take out one more of the postcards to write! I'm surprised they didn't discover the source of it all and confiscate my postcards! :)