IN A NUTSHELL:
* * DAY OF THE STUPID THING * *
Things I Should Have Known About Osaka My goal was to get from
my house to Osaka airport by 3pm this evening to make a 4pm flight to Sapporo. The plan was
that I would meet the rest of the group at the ANA counter where a guy named "Dave" would hand out
tickets. It was
snowing when I awoke so I left early at 9:30am to drive to Miyoshi, but I just missed the bus.
The buses were late because of the snow
and I ended up waiting almost 40 minutes for the next one. But once it arrived, everything from the
ride to Hiroshima, the streetcar to the main station and getting immediately on a super fast
shinkansen (bullet train) went fine. Once in Osaka, I got on a local train (it was running 25 minutes
behind schedule, but that did not
affect me since they run every 25 minutes and I caught the previous delayed train) and managed to make
it all the way to the airport. I arrived at the terminal at 3:05pm, only
five minutes late. I looked around at the ANA counter, the place where "Dave" and the group would be
waiting. I did not see anyone immediately. I walked around a bit and saw a group of gaijin at a counter,
except it was a counter you had to have a boarding pass to get through. I called over to them.
"Are you the group going to Hokkaido?"
"No, we're going to Okinawa," he replied. In Japan, Okinawa is about as far as you can get from Hokkaido.
Confused, I went to the information counter to ask about the flight. She looked at her computer and
said, "There's no 4pm flight here. The only 4pm flight to Sapporo leaves...
...from the other airport."
I Feel Suddenly Obligated to Report...
Osaka
Has
Two
Airports!
My Only Question Why did the woman who sold me the train ticket to the airport in the
first place not ask me WHICH airport I wanted? Did I just not understand her? Or did she assume
I wanted the more international airport since I am a foreigner? Either way, IRK! I was trusting that
I would be presented with any problem as it happened and therefore it never occurred to me to think that
Osaka had two airports (which OF COURSE it would - it's the second biggest city in Japan) nor which one
I would be at.
To Make a Long Story Short(er) I was at Kansai International Airport. The flight
was leaving in forty minutes from Osaka "Itami" International Airport, which was an hour and a half away.
I looked on my train map (that I had looked at earlier) in the JET Diary and, sure enough, there was that Other Airport, just
sitting there with just as big of a plane symbol and even CLOSER to the shinkansen station.
D'oh! Super, big, mega d'oh! I felt very stupid, even more so because I had come to the airport with
NO information. The organizers had not given me a receipt, a flight number, the reservation name, or
even a single phone number. I had absolutely NOTHING. Part of it was my own fault since I usually
prepare better than this. I was even going to email them for a phone number the previous day, but
never got around to it because I've been so busy. I did quickly guess the name the
reservation was under ("HAJET") and somehow, I convinced this poor woman at
the information counter (who had
excellent English, but was apparently not comfortable with it because she switched back to
Japanese immediately if I said anything in Japanese and I had to ask for English again every time) to
call her boss who called the other airport who found the travel agent for my group who had a phone number
for the organizer on that end. It took time (I was pacing dramatically, making the few other customers
who arrived nervous, I think) but she managed to get me a phone number at quarter to 4. I called and
told the person on the other end (thankfully one of the group members and a native English speaker) that
I would not be arriving and that I would get another flight, so please don't cancel my hotel reservation.
Now, having made contact, the challenge was getting to Sapporo.
A Very Indirect Reservation The woman at the ANA told me that the only
other flight to Sapporo that evening happened to leave from Kansai airport (which was, all things
considered, convenient) and that there was plenty of space. However, I would save 4000 yen ($40) if
I made the reservation from my cell phone! So here I was, at an airport counter, making a
reservation on my cell phone. Actually, to be precise, she was making it because the menus
were all in Japanese and I couldn't read it very well. As she made it, I couldn't help thinking that $40
was probably meant to be a savings for not taking up the airline's time. Too late.
The total came to about
31,000 yen. It was not until I went to the reservation counter that I found out that the price was
only for One Way. A shocking $300 for an hour and a half flight.
Now the big question was, were they going to cancel my flight back because I
did not arrive on the departing flight? I had no idea. Neither did anyone else. And the mystery
English-speaking person I called before had her phone turned off (no doubt because she was now
ON her flight.) I decided to cross my fingers, buy just the one way ticket,
and hope that I still had a reservation back.
Ranting About Whale Rider
I had over two hours until my flight and oddly, was never asked for my ID. I spent
the first hour upset at myself, feeling totally, totally stupid until I realized that it was not
that I was stupid, but that I had made assumptions that since this was a yearly trip, they had
everything taken care of. Because I've been so busy (I was even up until 3am the previous night trying to get organized) I did not plan ahead much, trusting to
experience. I usually always plan ahead and think through all possibilities. Too many other things have
been on my mind and to-do list and I did not want to stress out further by worrying about the trip.
Well, I won't make that mistake again.
Having decided that no, I'm not getting stupider with age, I felt a little better. I sat down
in the waiting area (thankfully relatively empty) with my book. I had recently
bought "Whale Rider" because the movie is apparently
quite good and, in general, I find the Maori culture fascinating. Although I was really looking forward
to reading, I could tell from the first sentence
that the writer (who I mistakenly thought was a woman until the writing made it obvious it was not
and I checked back to the introduction) was not very good at narrative. It was three chapters
before the girl (the "Whale Rider") was even mentioned and the stuff that came before was strangely
written, as if it was trying to be poetic, but only doing a marginal job. I admit, it could have been my
mood that made it not seem as good. I hoped
the story of the girl would catch my interest more. However, the book only seemed to be peripherally about
her, despite that she was the title character as well as pictured on both the front cover and the back cover.
The 'story' seemed to be the life of her older brother. I normally would not mind if
a story was told from someone else's point of view except the brother did not even live with his sister
and, in fact, took a random two-year trip to Papua New Guinea in the middle of the book that had
nothing to do with the story (following an equally pointless trip to Australia) and I wondered if maybe
the author was just talking about his life instead of remembering he was telling a story.
The character
saw his little sister once a year or every couple of years. Those scenes were the best
but the rest of the book is him talking about his dull life, making fun of his otherwise well-written
mother, even making a few
fat jokes about her (where the novel went from bad to worse) then a color-blind joke about her (which is
strange because color-blindness is relatively rare among women) and hanging out with
his friends.
His characters either seemed like caricatures or like people he must have known in real life. Luckily,
it was not very long and I managed to get through the whole book during my wait. The beach climax was
actually quite
good and we finally, at the end, got to go into the girl's character for a little while. I
am amazed, absolutely amazed, that this is a seasoned writer. He has a list of his published
books on the inside cover. Are all his works so amateurish and unorganized? At least there were
not too many grammar mistakes, but still. Learn to tell a story! Okay, done rant. I will still see
the movie because I heard it is from the girl's point of view which, unless I'm mistaken, would cleanly
cut all the bad parts out of the book.
Even the Snow Cannot Stop Me I finally got a hold of the girl to
ask if my return flight was going to be cancelled. She said she would have called me first
except my number did not
come up on her phone during my last three calls. Irk, I had forgotten to turn off that 'anonymity'
setting that was the default for some reason.
She was almost positive that it would not be cancelled. I, on the other hand, was pretty sure it would
be. I decided to not worry about it just yet. After the flight had boarded, the flight attendant warned that
we might have to turn around if we couldn't land in Sapporo due to snow conditions. I hoped, hoped, hoped
that this was a typical warning on flights up to Hokkaido. Whether it was or wasn't, however, we
managed to land in what looked like pure snow. I had to guess that the pilots were used to
this. However, we had be towed, yes towed,
to our gate afterward, which made me reconsider. My only snag was when I finally arrived in Sapporo proper and
boarded a taxi, the taxi driver had never heard of my hotel. The only thing (the ONLY) thing that
saved me was that my Board of Education had insisted that I make an itinerary for my trip and therefore
I had looked up the hotel on the internet to find the phone number. If it had not been for that, I would
have had no information at all to give the taxi driver. Whew.
A Final Snag When I finally reached the hotel, they could not see my
name at first because it was not listed as having a single room, like I requested and paid for. My name
was on the twin list, but my roommate had already checked in and therefore had the key. They
sat around with the list for awhile and eventually put me with someone who was present. They called
her, but she did not speak Japanese, so they put me on the phone with her. When I introduced myself as
Melissa, she thought I was the organizer since the organizer's name is Melissa, but I assured her I wasn't.
I was the "Stupid Melissa" who went to the wrong airport. I started introducing myself as this to
avoid confusion.
I had been kind of looking forward to
taking a shower and going to bed after my long day and now I had to deal with a person, however,
this was not a bad thing since it gave me someone to whine to and get sympathy from.
I probably ended up in a better mood
than I had been left alone to wonder, "Why am I the only one who made this mistake?"
