Day 1: Full English and a Bloody Mary

Day 1 was spent travelling my ridiculous 27 hour journey from my house in Penicuik to my apartment in Tokyo. I stayed up the whole night to make sure I could sleep on the plane. I said my painful good byes to my 3 dogs then set off with mum and dad to meet my gran and grandad at the airport. It was 5am on a Friday morning but it was still heaving. I got all checked in, my mum standing in line with me just to make sure my luggage wasn’t too heavy and then we all got a picture upstairs just before security. How do you really say “see you in 9 weeks!” to your family? They all looked pretty worried about me! I told them I’d done this before and was going to be fine J. I set off down into departure lounge and bought a few last minute buys in duty free before getting on my flight to Gatwick. I had the pleasure of being stuck next to an annoying young cockney couple on the plane. They just wouldn’t stfu.

An hour later I arrived in Gatwick and had to get checked into the next leg of my journey (to Incheon International Airport in Seoul). No problems there, through security and again I was in the departure lounge. I was planning on going to Yo! Sushi for breakfast but I stumbled across one of Jamie Oliver’s restaurants so went there instead. I got served by the nicest cockney lass ever and had a full English and bloody mary to get me started. I headed to my gate shortly after and realised I was like the only white person getting on this flight. The rest were Korean or Japanese. I got to my seat and realised the 2 seats next to me were empty. This was good because I could sleep across them all but bad because I was completely alone for the next 11 hours… I felt so bad for the Korean girl behind me, she was stuck with this old pervy Australian man. He kept asking her really weird questions aha, I should have helped her! The Korean flight attendants sure were a lot nicer than the Russian airline staff I flew with to Japan last time aha. No surprises there. They kept supplying me with Budweiser throughout the flight, which was a plus. I ended up watching 4 films and sleeping about 30 minutes.

I arrived in Incheon International Airport at 5am (Korean Time) and I was absolutely exhausted. I headed straight to the smoker’s lounge and spoke Korean for the first time in real life to ask for a lighter. I still had some lambert and butler left over, yaaay don’t know why I bought them in the first place. There was free wifi so I wapped my laptop out and went on Facebook to chat to some people and update more statuses. Eventually I found somewhere to go for “breakfast”. I decided to opt for what most would consider a dinner, and got Kimchi Jjigae. Essentially it was a spicy pork stew with rice and side dishes of kimchi etc. I was so confused because you order it at the cash desk and then sit down and one of three window will present you your order. It was kind of like Argos, where your order number comes up on a screen only you get food and not a Dyson hoover.

It came out and the pork stew was literally boiling hot. I almost dropped my tray I was so blinded by the steam coming off it. It didn’t cool down enough to eat for about 20 minutes so I just ate the kimchi aha. All the Korean people were looking at me as if to say “WHITE BOY EATING KOREAN FOOD? WTF?” I gobbled it all up and headed back to the smoker’s lounge for one last cigarette. I asked a nice man for a lighter and he happily obliged, asking me where I was from. When I said Scotland he looked very shocked! He replied his name was Yoji and he was from Tokyo, returning after a business trip! We chatted away and he ended up adding me on Facebook so we could keep in touch when I got to Japan. It turned out he was on my flight from Gatwick AND was on the same flight to Tokyo.

I caught my 3^rd and final flight to Tokyo! It was quite a short journey so I was starting to get relatively excited. I was so fucking tired at this point but I did manage to get 40 winks on this flight. I couldn’t believe I was finally going to be back in Tokyo after 2 years of waiting. It was going to feel like I never left…