Of Dogs and Curses
Interlude: In Which the Universe Sends Me Dogs
I'm sitting at my gate at Minnesota St. Paul airport when something licks my leg. Looking down, I find some kind of greyhound with the coloring of a blue heeler smiling up at me. I also see it's wearing a service animal vest and tugging along, at the end of a short leash, some kind of police officer or homeland security agent.
"Sorry about that," says the agent, tugging the leash to dissuade further fraternization. "He's young and impulsive."
While they shuffle off to sniff the rest of the gate area for contraband, I give the universe a silent thank-you. Anyone who knows me well knows I'm far from a superstitious person, but I do hold one completely unconfirmable belief: that the universe sends me dogs to calm me down and cheer me up when I'm stressed or sad - perhaps a corgi as I wander through the woods feeling sorry for myself after some mild misfortune, or a pack of chocolate labs as I tear down a city street, late for some important appointment. After a connecting flight to St. Paul that I had to leave for at the ripe hour of 3am, I'm feeling a little crispy, and staring down the barrel of a 13-hour direct flight to Haneda, I can use all the reassurance I can get.
I haven't even taken another bite of the yogurt cup passing for my breakfast before I hear a gruff voice say, "morning, folks. Just coming through with the dog. He may sniff you a little bit."
I turn to see yet another bomb-sniffing dog - this time a thin whippet of a dalmatian - straining at his leash while an increasingly impatient officer attempts to hold him back. This time, I also see the similarly uniformed officer following along behind the duo with a clipboard, making notes on their performance.
Untiring in his pursuit of justice and new smells, the dalmatian sniffs the carry-on luggage of one of my fellow passengers with such vim and vigor that he somehow trips over it, tumbling head over heels and landing in the position accepted internationally as begging for a bellyrub, wiggling indignantly. The clipboard bearer purses his lips - I can't tell if he's truly cross or trying not to laugh - and makes an emphatic note. The passenger in question remarks dryly that the terminal was just checked.
"It's graduation day for these guys," explains the dog's handler. "We're gonna have a bunch coming through today. Just a training exercise."
The hour leading up to my flight is a parade of six more furry friends, each trying desperately to do their best impression of a Big Serious Working Dog That Doesn't Get Distracted, and yet each clumsier, friendlier, and less likely to hack it as a bomb-sniffing agent than the last. As I flatfootedly clomp my way down the gangplank to the waiting 747 at the appointed time, a terrible thought occurs: was this parade of pups a consolation for the somewhat stressful early start to my day... or was it the universe's downpayment of joy, a pre-consolation for trials yet to come?
The answer, I would come to learn, was the latter.
In Which the Universe Sends Me Curses
It would be dramatic to say this trip has felt cursed so far. It's more accurate to say it's felt... off. But "Of Dogs and Vague Ennui" just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?
I've been waiting approximately five years to take this trip. It was meant to be a gift to myself on my completion of grad school, a victory lap and a sequel to the trip I took to South Korea in 2018. (If you're curious about that trip, the blog I wrote during it is still somehow up here.) From the moment the Diamond Princess docked off the shores of Okinawa, I knew that the postponement of my little victory lap was (rightly so!) going to be the least of anyone's worries, possibly for year to come. Going this year was more or less a matter of "if not now, when?"
And yet even as I sat in my office in January, having just pulled the trigger on the flights, the emotions at the forefront of my mind were not relief and excitement, but fear and worry. What if there was another major outbreak occurred, wasting years of savings and preventing me from trying again for another half a decade? What if I couldn't learn enough of the language to get by? (I had to quit a beginner language class halfway through the spring when work got crazy.) What if I had forgotten all my tricks and couldn't hack it as a roll-with-the-punches solo backpacker? I'm at the point in my life where I can feel myself getting a little older each year, a little more (dare I say it) rotund, my knees creakier, my on-foot range slipping into the sub-30k steps per day range. I put these fears aside, attempting to take a "que sera, sera" attitude to it all.
(Anyone who knows me at all knows I cannot take a "que sera, sera" attitude to save my life. Flexibility and weathering risk with grace are not skills to be found in my repertoire.)
All of this was compounded by my memories of Korea - of the (thankfully very few!) things that had gone really, truly wrong with that trip and my desire to avoid repeating them. I channeled my nervous energy into trying to do just that. To name a few:
My 24-hour door-to-door flights, though relatively cheap, left me with the worst jetlag I have ever experienced and had me running, half-delirious, across Charles de Gaulle to make my connection. This time, I sprang for flights leaving at a reasonable hour with a breezy layover in MSP (one of the nicest airports in the US).
I got majorly burnt out and homesick just past the two-week mark of my three-week trip, so I cut this trip down to two, no matter how much I wanted to tack more stuff on the end.
I ended up sending home half of my stuff because I had packed so much useless extra weight I couldn't stand carrying it around, even if it did fit in my nifty backpack. This time around I got a new, smaller backpack and cut down my packing weight on this trip to less than 25lbs.
I almost destroyed myself physically by doing a very difficult hike and then jumping right back into cityhopping, obliterating my plans for Busan. (To be fair, despite how it felt in the moment, I've gotten a lot of self-deprecating mileage out of telling the story of my idiocy in this matter - even the most boneheaded mistakes become good stories with time.) But with Japan, I decided to stick to what I do best - walking absurdly long distances across cities - and gave myself more room to breathe at each place.
And yet, despite my very best efforts to head disaster off at the pass, disaster found me anyway, the sly bastard.
Delta changed my flight at the last minute, consolidating it with a flight leaving at 5:30am instead of an entirely reasonable 8am. So much for my beauty sleep...
As we began our descent into Haneda, the dregs of a typhoon blew through the airport, anointing everything with heavy rain and even some lightning strikes on the runways. Like any ex-camp counselor worth their salt knows, lightning means "everybody take cover for 30 minutes after the last lightning strike to make sure it's passed." After a 13-hour flight, we spent an additional hour circling Tokyo at eight thousand feet and another hour sitting on the runway 200 feet from the gate waiting to taxi. By the time my feet hit the floor at Haneda, I was about three hours away from this being another 24-hour door-to-door experience and determined not to hit that mark.
Three hours after landing, I was still at the Haneda airport because - o classic, cliche, novice traveler's woe! - my ATM card wouldn't allow me withdraw cash. This may not have been an issue were Japan not still a "cash is king" society - it's literally impossible to buy train, bus, or subway tickets without cash, as ticket machines don't accept cards. This also may not have been an issue were I able to make a quick call to my bank to settle what might seem like fraud, but alas, it was approximately 2am (then 3am, then 4am, then 5am) back home, and the help lines were down until 7am. Eventually I tapped out, breaking down and ordering a taxi straight to my hotel's front door.
The piece de resistance - once I got cash, I tried to go grab a Suica card, a multi-purpose rechargeable cash card (not unlike the T-Money cards of Korea) used to swipe in and out of the subway as well as make small purchases at conbini (convenience stores)... only to find out that every Japanese transit company which offered Suica, or something like it, had simultaneously and without warning suspended sales of it approximately 90 seconds before I arrived. (Douglas Adams' "campaign of obstruction reaching godlike proportions" springs to mind here). The practical upshot? I would need to buy, individually, every subway ticket throughout my stay in one of the most notoriously complicated subway systems in the world. No pressure!
It was a somewhat defeated me, then, that set out on the morning of my first full day in Tokyo, trying not to let what had happened cast a pall over it all.
My Greatest Fear
...is none of these things, as difficult as they were to deal with. Rather, it's that I've forgotten how to blog! I mean, get a load of this post! Where's the open-minded joy and excitement of my Korea blog? Where the heartwarming anecdotes and educational tidbits? Five years ago, I was writing every day for grad school and posting regularly on social media, constantly practicing how to be charming. These days, I'm more of a digital hermit - after a first year at a new job that (predictably, based on it being a first year!) left me a little crispy and the implosion of the social internet of late, I've had little energy or occasion to post about myself, and writing has not been nearly so central to my new profession as might be expected. So I'm a little worried that my best, blog-wise, is behind me. On the whole, I know less about Japan than I did Korea; I have fewer firm plans and a less optimized itinerary, and very few expectations this time when it comes to my trip - I'm not sure I can pretend to expertise this time around. I completely understand if my grumbling and my fumbling prove to be less-than-riveting reads. But I'm going to do my best to accept my lens - who I am now and how that affects the way I perceive my experience. I am not the person I was five years ago... and, in many ways, thank goodness for that! I'm older, if not wiser, and at a different point in my life. This trip, I suspect, will be largely about me learning to celebrate that - and the weird little gremlin-hermit I have, of late, become.
If I've not put you off with the aforementioned grumbling and fumbling, stay tuned for the accounting I'll be putting out sometime tomorrow for my whirlwind time in Tokyo, where things have been, thankfully, looking up a bit. Today dawns my last full day in the capitol... I'm off to go seize it!