FACE MASKS AND PEACE SIGNS

Swine flu. H1N1. I call it a pain in the butt.

Kellie and I left the Indianapolis Airport at 10:00 a.m. Sunday morning and met Jess in Chicago for our direct flight to Tokyo’s Narita Airport. We noticed that several of the other passengers, none Caucasian-looking, were wearing face masks, and we felt a little guilty for not buying masks ourselves. That guilt lasted about, oh, 30 seconds before we realized how self-conscious we would feel wearing them on a plane with more than half of its passengers not wearing them. Not to mention we’d be wearing them for the better part of 13 hours.

13 hours. More than half a day sitting in the same cramped position on a Boeing 747.

I managed to sleep about two and a half hours. The rest of the time was spent eating Cheez-Its, watching “20th Century Boys” with subtitles on Japan Airlines’ entertainment channels, listening to Japanese pop radio, and just plain daydreaming. Unlike last summer, I didn’t bring my NAKAMA 2 textbook, so I couldn’t drill myself on kanji to pass the time.

To our relief, two meals and several hours later, we landed in Tokyo. To our disappointment, we were forced to stay on the plane for another hour and a half under “quarantine check.”

This quarantine check involved filling out a questionnaire about whether we had been sick or near someone who had been sick within the last week. Male nurses dressed in blue scrubs connected in the back with duct tape passed out face masks and collected our forms in an old filing box with a string shoulder strap – a makeshift bag, I guess. The nurses took some passengers’ temperatures, but other than that, quarantine wasn’t much more than waiting to be dismissed.

After about 15 hours on our 747, we finally stepped on ground again. It didn’t matter that we still had customs and passport checks to go through, or that we had another hour-and-a-half flight to Sapporo’s New Chitose Aiport. We were out of that plane and officially in Japan, and that’s all we really cared about.

To pass our two-and-a-half hour layover in Narita, we took turns napping on the surprisingly comfy plastic seats and watched Japanese music videos and newsflashes in English about H1N1 and Japanese entertainers on arrest for something. I remember falling asleep to the sounds of spectators cheering on a televised sumo match.

I don’t remember falling asleep on the plane, but I woke up to find we had already landed. In Jess’s words, “That was the best flight we’ve had yet.”

After being picked up by two English professors at Sapporo University, we learned that the university requested that we stay away from campus for four days just in case we had caught H1N1 at the airport.

Yay. Another quarantine. (We have come to hate the “Q” word, as we call it.) At that point, after more than 24 hours either in an airport or flying to another one, we didn’t care anymore. Really, we’re not high-maintenance travelers.

Warm shower. Sleep. Food. That’s all we needed. And once we got the keys to our apartments, that’s what we got. (Except for the warm shower. More on that later.)

BLOG SOUNDTRACK: Remioromen "Sakura"