Time travel

Well, that's Tokyo done (and me yet to even write up last Thursday in Singapore, sigh). I have to check out within the hour and then arrange some transport to the airport, which is at least an hour away from here, possibly longer depending on how I get there. Might manage to get online at the airport, in fact I'll be disappointed if I don't, but after I leave there I'll no longer be in THE FUTURE because I'm flying to THE PAST. Headfuck time: I leave at 1755 on October 11th and land at 1715 on October 11th, just over 12 hours later. Type ':s' into your SonyEricsson phone's text entry thing to see how I feel about this. Thankfully I'm staying at an airport hotel in New York and I plumped for 3 nights to give my mind and body a chance to recover (if necessary; if not, I'll do a bit of sightseeing I guess, even though I don't like New York) before crossing the pond and coming home on Sunday morning.

Tokyo photos so far (it's conceivable I'll take a few more before departing) are being uploaded to flickr right now, descriptionless though. I've also been indiscriminate, not proofing them for quality at all, so any I've taken that are utter shit will also be there. No change there.

One other thing about today's flight is that it's my first ever with American Airlines. Read various things about them, both good and bad (depending on the nationality of the author normally ;-) ). They want to be good (duh) -- I've another 5 or so flights with them in May/June next year plus a free* trip to Seattle (hopefully) before March, in cattle class. If my reservation thing on aa.com has worked properly I'll be sitting in 10J today, which is a window seat over the wing and 2nd row from the front. AA operate a policy where the food gets served from front rows first when the flight number is even, back rows first when it's odd. Flyertalkers refer to this as FEBO (Front Even Back Odd). I'm keen to get served first ;-) and today's flight numer is 168. As it happens I was told in Hong Kong that the numbers 1, 6 and 8 together are very lucky -- they are mad superstitious over there, and in fact when I bought 3 little horse+jockey models I did indeed get sold numbers 1, 6, and 8 -- so perhaps I'll get upgraded. Mind you, the luck must surely apply to everyone onboard, so perhaps not. Anyway... could have sat on row 9 but it's supposedly not so good, something to do with proximity to the shitters and lack of storage or summat. I guess in 7 hours or so I'll find out whether all this geekery, sorry, researchhas paid off.