Japan Airlines is really impressive. I’m at 40,000 feet altitude and sitting pretty comfortable. This airline just delivers a level of service that is unparalleled with domestic carriers. It’s tough for me to remember, but I think that the only other international airline that I’ve been on was Lufthansa, which wasn’t as impressive. Here I will list the glorious accolades of Japan Airlines:
– The plane is huge. Bigger than anything I’ve ever been on. It must be a 777, because I’ve been on a 747, but never an aircraft with two levels
– All of the stewardesses are cute and seemingly very subservient Japanese women. There’s one almost across from me who looks like Kat. Super hot.
– I HAVE MY OWN ENTERTAINMENT CONSOLE DEVICE. It’s fantastic. A small LCD extends out from the side of the seat and sits in front of me, it’s about 6-7″ diagonally, and there’s a retractable remote which comes out of my arm rest. You can nagivate through menus to access different features, including live video feeds from cameras mounted on the front and bottom of the plane. This is certainly Gods airline. They have some games also, but they are fairly mediocre, glorified cell phone-type games. Although they do have one which is a generic Marble Madness which is pretty excellent. It also includes a navigation map, which shows the location of the plane on a map. You can find out information like speed, altitude, ETA, and so on. There are some Japanese television stations that I can flip through as well as some audio channels which I have yet to check out. I was intent on listening to my ipod for the duration of the flight, but I don’t think I’ll even need to do that anymore.
– They bring you hot hand towels to wash your face and hands with. Like the kind that you get after a meal at some select Japanese restaurants. This was a suprise and was much appreciated.
– Instead of getting peanuts, I got some kind of Japanese vegetable-cracker concoction which was foreign but quite delicious.
Oh it’s nice being on Japan Airlines. Before boarding, I was really dreading having to spend 12 hours on a flight. There are signs for stuff everywhere that are in Japanese, indicating where the exit rows and life jackets are, etc. Because I’m sitting in an emergency exit row (thank God), there’s a big one in front of me which is the Emergency Door Opening Instructions. I will probably try to write this out in Japanese in my journal to see how that goes. I’ve been writing in the handheld journal a lot today, and especially a lot of the time when I was waiting to board the aircraft (which was delayed twice because of inclement weather and a tardy incoming jet).
I want to write more, but I don’t want to exhaust the batteries on my laptop because I fear that I’ll need it. I don’t have a voltage convertor that’ll allow me to plug in my US devices into Japanese power outlets, but hopefully I’ll be able to find one in Tokyo Narita airport. I really look forward to arriving there and checking that out, although I must say that even at the terminal in LAX, I really felt like I was already in Asia. Caucasians were very rare, and everyone was speaking Japanese. I see Japanese people around all the time, but I think that generally they’re some kind of mix of nationalities, mostly Japanese-American. These were certainly individuals of pure blood though, which was cool to see. I saw an 8 year old kid wearing all this thugged out shit like he was 25, including Air Jordans and a Philly Sixers cap with the Official NBA sticker still on the top of the bill on the hat. He was an elite little dude. There was also one guy who had on one of those surgery SARS masks. At the terminal in LAX. Weird. I noticed as he got on the plane and walked around in the cabin he seemed very normal and comfortable and no one paid him any mind. I’m wondering how much more of that I’ll see. I hear that Japanese are very hygenic and clean, but then again, yesterday Eric Metro told me that he saw a Japanese scat video where some Japanese dude eats the shit out of some girls ass. I hope to not witness this myself.