When
· Naughties
· · 2007
· · · November
· · · · 15 (3 entries)
Narita T2 ANA Lounge · If you travel a lot on Star Alliance and you’re heading out of Narita, I’d like to recommend the ANA Lounge in Narita Terminal 2, out at the far end around Gate 44. It’s one of the nicest I’ve seen anywhere. They have lots of space, comfy chairs, secluded cubicles if you need to buckle down, decent WiFi albeit with slow DNS, excellent draught beer from a way-cool automated pouring machine, a selection of fine sakes, vegetarian sushi, and—this is just beyond brilliant—an Udon/Soba bar where a couple of wrinkled old guys will fix you a bowl on demand. There are few items I can think of that are more proactively therapeutic against a 10+-hour flight than a bellyfull of light warm salty Japanese soup and noodles. If you’re feeling burned out and have four or five fine sakes that tends to counteract the benefits though. Hmmm, upstairs there’s an ANA “First Class” facility I didn’t have sufficient status to get into. The mind boggles at the delights that must lie inside.
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[1 comment]
Dirty Rainbow · I snagged the front center seat on the Narita bus so I had a panoramic view forward; the haze of jetlag and post-speech letdown was biting hard as the Nissan Diesel grumbled up onto the Rainbow Bridge. The architectural madness around Tokyo Bay soars white on cream on beige on black in the filtered sun against the shit-coloured Tokyo November afternoon sky and when you’re weakened you can kid yourself that it all fits together and makes sense somehow, but it doesn’t. It can’t be photographed and it can’t be described, you have to see it and you still won’t believe it. It’s just crazy, that’s all.
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[3 comments]
Shinjuku Cameras · I didn’t have to take off for my first meeting till eleven, so I cruised into Shinjuku around 9:30 to see what I could do about the slow-camera problem. Which turned out to be about perfect, since it’s Yodabashi’s opening time; so I got a leisurely look at the stuff with help from the staff. I gather the normal Yodabashi experience is wall-to-wall crush ...
[10 comments]
[10 comments]
