Off to England

Posted on 2006/03/23 07:12:12 (March 2006).

[Tuesday 21st March]
Our flight from Tokyo Narita was at midday, but as the airport is a fair way from central Tokyo, we needed to get up and leave the flat fairly early still. Interestingly it was the first time for Chie to ride on the Narita Express train, which had become somewhat second nature for me with all my recent trips to Seattle.

Now I don't like flying, and as a side effect I also don't like airports. Today there seemed to be an unusually large amount of kerfuffle in getting checked in, and I had to visit a total of five check-in desks to get myself sorted out. So by the time I'd got all that sorted, as well as the usual messing about with security checks and immigration, I was actually feeling quite agitated.

Luckily we discovered an excellent remedy to this. As I've flown rather a lot recently with KLM/Northwest, I'm now a gold (almost platinum) member of their mileage programme. This means, apparently, I can use their business class lounge, even when I'm not flying business class, and even when I'm flying with a completely different airline (today we were flying with Virgin for the first time). Oh and also I was able to take a guest, so Chie could come and join me - and I don't think she'd ever been in one of these lounges before. I am still not sure if this was all totally official, or if it was just because we'd talked to a trainee at the reception desk for the lounge who was too afraid to say no! Anyway though, we were let in, and so prior to boarding Chie and I had a really good half hour or so relaxing in some comfy chairs, with free drinks and snacks.

The flight itself was OK I suppose. We'd paid a bit extra to get a seat with more legroom - they charge you to sit by the exits on Virgin. However, just after getting onboard the stewardess had broken my video screen (it just snapped off in her hands). The staff were very good about it though - to say sorry they brought champagne and chocolates, and we were also offered to upgrade to Premium Economy. We went to take a look, and actually it felt more crowded in Premium, so were were happy to just go back to regular economy, where we managed to find some pretty reasonable alternative seats. The food was more or less OK, the movie selection was a bit crap, but made up for with some very good TV programs. I watched a few episodes of the Simpsons, a few of Little Britain, and also an entire series of Peep Show which turned out to be rather good, albeit somewhat cringe inducing at times.

We landed in Heathrow well ahead of schedule, and although we lost some of that time in the horrendously long queue for immigration, we did still manage to get out of the airport around 4, meaning we were pretty much in Reading by 5. After a quick coffee, we got a taxi over to Simon's house, who had very kindly offered to put us up for the night. Spent the evening chatting with Simon and Vanessa, eating pizza, and supping beer. A very nice and gentle introduction back to England.

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