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[RC] On the way ... - Lucie Hess

Wednesday, Oct 29th Narita, Japan.I’m sitting in a room at the Holiday Inn in 
Narita, Japan. The travel arrangements wouldn’t permit me to go straight to 
Malaysia without an overnight stay. So here I am “in Transit” in Japan. 
Narita is where the Tokyo airport is, about an hour outside of Tokyo.It’s 
4:12 am here and it’s 2:12 pm at home. I think it may still be the 28th 
there.. Heck I’m confused.. I do know we went over the International Dateline 
and immediately there was a 5 hr change between there and Chicago. (I boarded 
the International flight in Chicago)I got here around 3:30 pm Japan time.. I 
went to the Hotel, checked in and thought I would take a short nap around 6 pm, 
and get up around 8 and get dinner, well… I woke up at 9:30 pm, got out of my 
clothes and said.. “I’m going back to bed”.The last time I had slept was 
Saturday night.. Sunday, I woke up at 7:30 am and didn’t go to bed until I 
got here. I had to be up at 3:00
am to get ready to go catch the airport shuttle and I’m a night owl, so when 
it was after midnight Monday morning, I said “what the heck.. what’s a few 
hours?” So this morning I woke up again around 1:30 am here, after trying to 
get back to sleep, I decided I was UP and wandered about the Hotel using the 
vending machines. They still sell cigarettes in Vending Machines and Beer.. 
Lot’s of Beer.. Big cans even. No ..I didn’t buy any beer! I bought a 
pastry, a bottle of what I thought was water, but was like Gatorade.. I also 
bought a small bottle of water.. I can’t remember if I’m not supposed to 
drink the water here.. I KNOW NOT to drink tap water in Malaysia!The flight was 
uneventful.. LONG but uneventful. I flew to Chicago from St. Louis, then 
Chicago to Japan.Note to self.. Next time get an aisle seat! The young lady who 
sat on the aisle slept almost the whole way.. She must have had better drugs 
than I did.. She didn’t speak any
English and I don’t speak Japanese, so we had to communicate with hand 
signals and smiles. She knew I had to get up and go to the bathroom every time 
I pushed her out of her seat. No sense in being subtle. At the airport it 
seemed like folks are afraid of getting sick , some of the passport control 
workers had masks on and there were signs all over that said if you were sick 
to go see someone and arrows pointing to where. I think I even saw a sign that 
said our temperature was being taken as we walked down a hallway.. Kinda 
“Paranoid” if you ask me. I noticed how quiet it was on the plane and it 
was quiet when we disembarked.. No cell phones ringing, no babies crying. No 
loud talking.. And it continued.. It is SO quiet here, it’s disconcerting. It 
was quiet in the airport and VERY quiet outside of the airport, that’s 
usually where there is s a cacophony of sounds: car horns ,whistles for taxis, 
people talking to each other, shouts of Taxi
drivers, People yelling for taxis and the sounds of Diesel busses..None of 
that.. Nothing…The Hotel is quiet as well.Everything is clean here. Real 
clean, no trash anywhere on the streets. People are nice. I have 2 words of 
Japanese when I came, “Good day and thank you“.. Now I know “good 
evening”. I said thank you in English and in Japanese to two men in the hotel 
elevator and they smiled and thanked me in English, I then told them good day 
in Japanese and they smiled again and then told me there was another word for 
good evening.. So with some bowing and other pleasantries, I learned a new 
word. God, I hope my pronunciation is good and I’m not calling someone’s 
mother a bad word.Plans for today are to get to the airport in the morning, my 
flight to Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) leaves at 11:30, another 7 and ½ hr flight. 
Once I get to Kuala Lumpur.. My last flight to Terengganu (where the race is) 
lasts a little over an hour. I’m supposed
to arrive there at 8:30 or so pm tonight.. Yippee!More later.. I think 

Columbia, Missouri
 NATRC Region 6
 AERC # 65 
 AERC Central Region
 OCER member




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