July 19th, 2pm in Tokyo

July 19th, 2pm in Tokyo

So here I am, enjoying what little Japanese culture I can as I sit in a 4 hour layover between the US and Singapore in Tokyo’s Narita International Airport. I’ve been awake for 3 days and 1 night in the last 48 hours. It’s literally been the longest day of my life! I just got off a 14 hour flight from Atlanta during which the sun never set. We flew west---west---west, the hours ticked down, then suddenly BAM! It’s Saturday, 24 hour jump ahead as we cross the prime meridian, but the sun never stopped shining. Essentially, I skipped a night. What a weird feeling.

I’m lost, slightly confused about what’s going on, I’m hungry, I don’t recognize any of the food options, and I’m pretty broke at the moment. It’s good to travel internationally again! I’ve been staving off insanity by playing Super Nintendo emulators on the plane, but it really isn’t the worst I’ve ever been through. Try sitting on a Greyhound bus for a 30 hour bustrip that ends up taking 50 hours, with layovers at least every 8 hours, THAT, my friend, is hell. At least here I wasn’t afraid of people stealing my stuff and/or knifing me.

Haha, I turn my head to see McCain and Obama debates on the local TV. I wish this shit wasn’t spread all over the world, I feel like I can never escape listening to election news.

Oh, so I sat next to this guy on the plane, and we got to talking about why we’re flying out to Tokyo. He said he worked for a company called EMA, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of SAIC, so I had to shake his hand, because apparently we’re co-workers and we didn’t even know it >.<. Of course, we work in completely different divisions of the company, but still, it was kinda cool.

I need a socket converter. I think I’m going to dedicate the next few hours to 1. finding this socket converter, and 2. finding a socket to convert, then 3. playing games until I can fly again. I’m so tired right now, it’s about 1:10am EST, AND I’ve been up since 7am on Thursday morning (also EST). I got sick earlier this week and had to take a day off work because I was contagious at the time, but I HAD to get work done, so I worked through the night on Thursday night after seeing friends for a couple hours. I got about 90% of the work that I needed to get done, done. I’ll have to rely on another project manager to ship this server out the door on Monday since I couldn’t get it out by Friday morning. I called my boss at 3:30am EST, which is 3:30pm in Singapore, and he said that some of his equipment was defective and he desperately needed me to bring a backup along. He then shot off a bunch of names of people that I needed to talk to, to which I responded, “Dude, it’s 3:30am, I’m the only one here”, and he said “What the hell are you doing in the office at that time? Whatever, this is lucky, just grab the test equipment we’ve been using and bring it.” So hooray, I do not feel that my exhaustion is in vain.

I’m going to try and post regularly while I’m in Singapore. Most of the people I love to annoy on instant messengers are now on opposite schedules, so, as per the norm, the blog will be the method of update while traveling internationally.

I wish I some actual time in Tokyo. Just from what I’ve seen so far, I’d like to spend some time here and just check everything out :-P. Plus, the Japanese language is amazing to listen to.