Connecting flights

First of all I have to say that flying at night is so wicked!!! Seeing all the lights of the cities and stuff from the plane is amazing! LA was so big and bright! And I really don't think they had enough baseball diamonds...

Anyways, Thursday night I left Chicago and had a 3.5 hour flight to LA, wasn't bad at all other than the complete lack of leg room! I watched to episodes of MR.BRAIN. And of course as my battery is dying I end on a 2 part episode...Takuya Kimura is so amazing!!!

Next was the flight from LA to Beijing, 12.5 hours. I actually slept on a plane!!! I wasn't planning on sleeping, but they turned all the lights off and I found a yoga channel on the radio that had beautiful, relaxing Chinese music playing. I ended up sleeping about 9 hours of the flight. The food was amazing too!!! It's airplane food, but compared to American airplane food, this was like a 5 star meal!

BEIJING AIRPORT IS HUGE!!! I was so freaked out I'd get lost, and I did end up just standing in the middle of a big open area looking around for about 15 minutes...Security took my snow glob that I forgot I had in my bag. Funny thing is that Chicago didn't even catch it, LA caught it but said it was fine, then China takes it away! I almost got it to Japan... But going back to how big it was, I swear it took me 20 minutes to walk from the security point to the gate where my plane was! It just had to be at the farthest gate from everything! Not to mention I got a huge blister walking there and a blister plus boots are NOT fun at all! Got my laptop charged up and started looking over grammar from my Japanese textbook, don't know why I did grammar when my problem is with vocab...

The flight to Japan didn't start off all that well, we got on the plane ready to leave and end up sitting on there at the gate for an hour waiting for the traffic control tower to give us the OK... Finally got to Japan and watching the landing was amazing!!! It was so pretty! And Osaka is HUGE...Maps don't do it justice!

As I'm standing in like waiting to get approved to be let in, I decided to take a change and guess that the guy next to me who was also on the same flight from LA to Beijing and Beijing to Osaka might have been going to Kansai Gaidai too. And he was, and there also ended up being about 5 people on the Beijing flight going to Kansai Gaidai. We all bonded a bit while waiting for our bags. I made it though customs without any problems, unlike when I came back from Japan the last time...

Meet so many people just on the bus ride. From Hong Kong, South Korea, Netherlands, bunch from US, and someone from Iceland. The trip to the dorms was about 1 hour and 15 minutes.

The dorm I'm staying in is very traditional, tatami mats and rice paper screens in every room! Once i got all my stuff put in my room, our RA lead a group of us to the store to get food for dinner. It's such a nice area around the dorms! Because we don’t have kitchen access I just got a bowl of Ramen and a HUGE jug of water! Over dinner we talked to a bunch of people and made plans to go to Namba today. I can't wait, probably won't buy anything yet, but I can at least look at the stores. I want to go into the SEX POT OSAKA shop so bad!!!

After a bit more talking I went back to my room and my other roommate was there. Even after only being here for not even a day I wish I would have stayed in the dorms rather than home stay, but that should be a great experience too!

Finally got to go to bed on one of the most comfy futons in the world! Slept till 6, wanted to sleep more but jetlag wouldn't let me. And so here I am writing this and waiting for a friend to get up so we can go shopping and just wander around before going to Namba this afternoon!

Gilli

...PS, I forgot a towel, so I have to find some place to get one and take a shower. I WANT A SHOWER SO BAD IT'S SO HOT!!!