And as usual we are prepared for our vacation a couple of weeks before departure and the only thing we needed to do is packing our suitcases. The plan was to start on friday evening after work but this was shifted to saturday morning, on saturday morning we delayed it until saturday afternoon and finally we started packing sunday late afternoon.

Did you really read a ‘we’ in this part of the trip? Yes you did read that, this was probably the first time that I did most of the packing myself… Early in the evening our suitcase were finished except for the some smaller things.

Monday morning we woke up from the alarm-clock and 1,5 hour later we left our house towards Nürnberg Airport where our first flight took of at exactly 10:25 but the start got aborted. For a moment we thought the plane had technical problems but 10 minutes later the pilot told he need to abort take-off because another plane was landing, a bit strange but at the world-famous and busy airport of Nürnberg such thing can happen. Only 5 minutes later we were in the air on our way to Paris.

In Paris we had a very good experience at the airport, the queuing for our flight to Tokyo went well and you could already feel the Japanese influence. There were no arguments, no pushing, no queue jumping, no stress, … With 30 minutes delay we left Paris together with Air France in A380-800 towards Narita Airport (about 80 km. from Tokyo). The flight was long but excellent with the standard glass of Champagne and the meals we preordered Danielle went for the ‘ocean meal’ and I went for ‘italian’. Although we started later as planned we landed almost on time. After a really fast border control, we lost a bit of time while waiting for our suitcases but in the end we left the airport within 1 hour from landing.

After we came to the border control we walked towards the JR East Travel Service Center to get a special combination for a round-trip with the Narita Airport Express (NEX) including a Suica prepaid card. The NEX is a train line which brings people from the Airpot directly into Tokyo and some surrounding areas and the Suica card can be charged at every station and makes it possible to pay contact free. But before we came to the Service Center we needed to catch a couple of escalators and this was actually a quite funny experience since after a couple of moments a line was behind us since people where lining behind us because we were both standing on the wrong side of the escalator. In Japan the people stay on the left side and walk on the right side which they also do whiteout questioning it.

Before we left Narita we had a coffee at the Starbucks to wait for the 11:14 (local Japanese  time). After finishing our coffee we walk towards platform 1 where we boarded for a 68 minutes train ride towards Shinagawa Station. After our arrival we walked straight to our hotel and after checking we only had to wait 25 minutes before our room was ready. We stay at the 27th floor, get every day 2 new bottles of water, had fruit on arrival and on top of that we got upgrade towards a Premium King. During the wait for our room keys we also got our mail which contained the train tickets and also very important the Mobile Hotspot from a local provider.

In less than an hour we took a shower, changed clothes and left for Tokyo DisneyLand for the 2nd part of our 32 hour-long day.

And since this week we also have our shinkansen-tickets (bullet train) for our vacation in Japan. Via www.hyperdia.com/en we’ve selected the trains and a local colleague from Sander bought the tickets for us because buying the tickets can only be done online in Japanese, at the train stations or via travel agencies. From those three the latest two options would have been possible but buying locally would have been a risk since we travel through Japan during the Japanese spring break which means that it can be really crowded and trains at popular times can be sold out quickly. Buying them via a travel agency would have mean that we were net able to select the exact schedule.

So what schedule do we have for our trains? On Saturday we leave Tokyo at 8:27 with the Nozomi Shinkansen towards Kyoto where we arrive at 10:3, give or take a couple of seconds. after one night in Kyoto we leave towards Hiroshima with again a Nozomi Shinkansen at 12:52 Nozomi Shinkansen.And after staying one night in Hiroshima we will leave here at 15:08 to go back to Tokyo where we arrive at 19:06. For this long ride we’ve ordered seats in the so-called green car, this is the name for 1st class in the Shinkansen. One of the best things about the Shinkansen is that you will always face in driving direction because at the end of the line they can rotate the seats, this makes it easier to select seats.

For this trip we’ve got 5 train tickets and they are in Japanese! Which means that if we are lucky we do understand our tickets, but we’ve found an easy explanation on the internet.

We can’t wait to leave to the land of the rising sun!