Thoughts on Another Airplane

TOKYO
Narita Airport to Tokyo Station: 57 km
Minimum time by public transit: 57 minutes
Why on earth did you decide to put your main international airport so far from downtown?

One nice thing about Narita airport being so far from Tokyo is that it offers a phenomenal view of the Tokyo skyline when you take off on a clear night. A sea of bright lights - and a little red pine needle that is the Tokyo Tower, and a pulsating toothpick known as the Sky Tree. Beautiful.

Normally when I fly Japan -> Canada, we head north, via Alaska. But for some reason, though we took off facing north, the plane immediately went through a full U-turn and headed straight south. Maybe to get better winds? Whatever the case, as we flew further up and further south, I was able to see the entire Kanto Plains in glow-in-the-dark. As far as I can remember, that was the first time I've ever seen a piece of the earth's surface that could actually be identified by its shape on a world atlas. It suddenly offered a rare opportunity to piece together the small-scale (my views of Tokyo from being inside it) with the medium-scale (the view of Kanto I had during take-off) with the large-scale (my knowledge of where this landform fits in with the world), and suddenly the world seemed so much bigger than I had ever pictured, but at the same time somehow oddly small and manageable.

It was one of those midsplosion moments and my frontal lobe kinda shut down for a couple seconds after. But after I regained the ability of cognition, I noticed something else interesting - I could see almost no distinction between stars and fishing boats. The sky as black as the sea, no horizon distinguished the two, and the speckles of light were roughly as equally spaced if I looked down as if I looked up. No mindsplosion this time, but I did get a little dizzy.

I watched Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close on the plane. Having read the book, I had absolutely no clue how they'd turn it into a movie (I highly recommend the book, it's a very unusual experience) but all things considered I thought they preserved the spirit of it fairly well.

At one point during the flight I looked out the window. There a single blinding light at the tip of the wing - or at least, what I knew to be the tip of the wing. I couldn't see the wing at all, or anything except a deep blackness and the one bright yellowish light. But then I noticed a very small flashing red that seemed to drift lazily toward the spotlight, and realized it must be an airplane. Stared at it for a couple minutes: Blink, and gone. Then blink, and gone. Then blink, and gone again... but then it didn't come back.

I don't know why, but this was incredibly unnerving. I knew it must have just gone behind a cloud, but the fact that I could see it before, and not see it now, and saw nothing get in the way, caused my imagination to run wild about what could possibly have happened to that plane. It's amazing how even when you know something must be there, especially if it's something you see all the time, there's something deeply unsettling about staring right at it and not being able to see it at all.

Somehow I did get actually get a couple hours of sleep on the plane.

AIRPLANE FOOD!! Hahahahaha. Well actually Air Canada isn't that bad. Besides the fruit and the hot meal, everything tasted really good, and those two things weren't terribly awful either.

TORONTO

Pearson airport to Union station: 19 km
Minimum time by public transit: 57 minutes
...Seriously?