Non-Non-Stop to Japan

After my layover at Istanbul International Airport two years ago, I promised to myself to only book non-stop flights in the future. A promise I could not keep, as they cost twice the regular price this year. We all know how that came.

So it was Thai Airways this time. And I was lucky. The flight was not fully booked and I happened to get a seat in one otherwise empty row. So I could actually sleep a bit before landing in Bangkok. The two and a half hours layover was just enough to walk to the gate of the connecting flight. Okay, not really, but the airport is huge. And there is a lot you can do.

There is an apparently new system for immigration in Japan. The lady at the check-in counter told me about the website Visit Japan Web. She put it as if it was mandatory, which it is not. But it seems to speed things up a little at the immigration and customs.

It is also not too easy to fill in the many details. There is an option to scan your passport, so all the data is filled in automatically. I just didn't work. It suggested better and brighter light and may retries, but after at least 30 times I gave up and transferred everything manually. This did of course not work for the picture of my face. For some reason it was said, this was necessary for the customs declaration. Unclear why that would be.

Nevertheless it still worked. At arrival I was directed to a long but reasonably fast-moving lane to a machine which I could present the QR code from the website to. It then did what the web app could not do and successfully scanned my passport. I also wanted the fingerprints of both of my index fingers.

Then there were four lanes with different colors and letters from a to d. At one point there was a huge display with a live feed from a camera showing all the people walking along. The system put a colored letter tag to each face, where that person was supposed to go. Pretty cool (and a bit scary too)!

Still there was a young man checking my (and all other people’s) passport very long, extremely careful and quite thoroughly. And he did not speak or reply to me. But he finally wacked a stamp on one page of the passport and gave it back to me.

I had clicked myself an unlimited mobile data plan for the phone and I transfered a bit of money to my virtual Suica card before I left for Japan. So all I had to do was to redeem my voucher of the JR Rail Ticket. The lady at the JR office also made a seat reservation to Kyoto.

If you plan to go to Japan, you might want to check if the JR Ticket is a good deal for you. For 550 EUR you can by a lot of single tickets. Same for the data plan. The 22 EUR for 20 GB would not have been enough, but buying this twice might and would still be cheaper than the flat plan. But it is nice to know that I don't need to care about it for the whole time I'm here.

I arrived at the hotel at around six o'clock, had a shower and went for my first Japanese dinner this year. A Chashu bowl, three chunks of Karaage, and an Asahi beer. おいしい (oishi = delicious)!