June 3, 2006
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made my breakfast, which consisted of the last two frozen waffles in the freezer and coffee.
After that, there was nothing but a box of Lean Pockets in the freezer and some water in
the refrigerator. There was hardly any food left in the apartment. I didn't want to leave
anything that would spoil while I was away. After that, I finished packing. All that was left to
pack were my toiletries after I took a shower and got dressed. I checked my inboxes for
the last time and hoped that they wouldn't be too full the next time I checked them. After 8
AM, I started locking up. I made sure everything on the balcony was stowed away. At
8:30, I locked the front door and loaded my luggage into my car and I was officially on my
way.
Traffic was very light on the way to the airport. I was at JohnnyPark at 8:50. I wasn't there
long. They asked me for my reservation, took the keys, gave be a claim check and I
loaded my luggage onto a bus and headed for the terminal. I was at the Tom Bradley
International Terminal by 9 AM. The first thing to go through was security screening for
checked baggage, which is hard to miss if you're not looking for it. I was almost up to the
JAL ticket window before somebody told me where baggage screening was. It really didn't
take very long. After that, somebody walks your luggage to your ticket window, which
didn't open for another 30 minutes. Check-in didn't take too long because I was there
early and I was near the front of the line. I proceeded to the next security checkpoint.
Even though they didn't ask me, I took off my shoes and put them through the x-ray
machine. I always get asked to take off my shoes, so I just did it. By 10 AM, I had reached
the boarding gate, but the plane was scheduled to start boarding at 12:45, so I had a lot of
time to kill. I ate breakfast and looked in the nearby shops and tried not to be bored. The
next gate down the terminal was a Mexicana Airlines flight. It was weird because lost
people would ask me questions in either Spanish or Japanese and I didn't know how to
speak either language.
At 11:30 AM, the plane rolled up to the gate and the crew went inside. It was a really
good-looking crew. At nearly 1:00 PM, the passengers started boarding. I had the aisle
seat so I waited until almost everybody else went in before I boarded. By 1:30 PM, we
were in the air. It's a ten-hour plane ride to Tokyo from Los Angeles. There isn't a whole
lot of leg room in coach. I had to get up and stretch my legs every few hours. Flying on
JAL is pretty good. They never stop giving you refreshments. We weren't in the air long
before we got rice crackers and a beverage. It wasn't soon after that when we got lunch.
We had a choice of chicken or fish. I chose the chicken. You can even have a free beer
with your meal, but I had juice. After lunch, everybody got a bottle of water to drink on the
way. For dinner, we had ravioli. The personal entertainment system was okay. They had
movies, but they weren't on-demand. Every passenger who watches the same thing gets
the same feed, so you often started watching something in the middle. It seemed like half
of the movies were about sled dogs in Antarctica. I watched Eight Below and The New
World. I really wasn't into either of them. I watched a few of the Japanese movies as
well--even the Japanese movie about Antarctic sled dogs. I tried the video game system,
but found the controls to be unresponsive and so I lost a lot of my lives quickly. Bowling
was fun but it took forever to load. On Soliaire, the speed of the controller didn't matter so
it was the easiest to play. The music program was actually really good and I spent a lot of
time on that.