Back to Tokyo

Posted on 2006/03/03 22:17:27 (March 2006).

[Thursday 2nd March]
Today I headed back to Tokyo after my 10 or 11 days on business in the US. Checked out of the hotel around 10, and got a very dodgy taxi to the airport (I thought the taxi driver was a homeless person when he first wandered into the hotel). I ended up arriving at the airport a lot earlier than I needed to, so spent some time attempting to recover from my hangover in the business class lounge. I drank a lot of their expensive mineral water, plus some tomato juice, although the latter didn't seem particularly helpful. The cheese and pretzels, on the other hand, did seem to bring about a slight improvement.

The business class section of the plane was almost full of people working for my company - two of my colleagues were coming to Tokyo, plus the guy I sat next to turned out to be in a distantly related department, and I also spotted at least two other people carrying the tell tale signs (asset tags on their laptops).

Just like the last business trip, the food had been OK on the way out (Tokyo to Seattle) but was awful on the way back (Seattle to Tokyo). I guess this means their caterer in Seattle really stinks - at least as far as vegetarian food goes. I think I may be forced to write and complain - a business class ticket is several thousand dollars, so you'd think they'd be able to make at least half decent food on that sort of budget. My lunch/dinner meal was a bowl of potatoes, cabbage and rice (go figure!) and the breakfast main was again the bizarre rice with cinnamon thing, I'm not even sure what it was supposed to be. Both of these "dishes" would have together had a raw ingredients cost of less than a dollar.

I'm still fascinated by timezones, particularly given that the last 12 months has seen me spending so much time flitting between them. Tokyo is a whacking 17 hours ahead of Seattle. This means on the way back you pretty much lose two whole working days - the flight I took left at 1PM on Thursday (Seattle time) and arrived 5PM on Friday (Tokyo time). In practice though I was only on the plane 10 or 11 hours of course. The particularly interesting thing about this flight is crossing the International Date Line. So normally, the time zone changes are roughly linear - every 15 degrees of longitude shifts by an hour. When going over the IDL though, there is a sudden non-linear "blip". So if you are trying to keep track of local time on the corresponding spot on the ground it, there is a big jump, in my case from Thursday evening to Friday afternoon. So this means, in a sense, the morning of Friday 3rd March 2006 actually never happened for me - this was an expanse of time that I never actually experienced anywhere. Bizarre, isn't it?

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