Day 1

Prayer Request: That we would not waste too much time by getting lost.

We arrived in Japan!

After spending 13 hours intermittently sleeping, watching movies, reading, and eating small airplane meals, we arrived at Narita Airport. We went straight to customs, only to get lost in the crowd and have to swim upstream to get in the correct line. Unfortunately, the line for foreign passports had spilled past the official line by about 3 rows of people, but we all managed to stay in fairly straight, make-shift lines until an airport security official came over to direct traffic.

After that everything went smoothly: I figured out where the ATM and the PASMO train card machines were without too much difficulty, and we boarded the local train for central Tokyo (the next express train for which we could buy tickets was an hour out, and was more expensive). For some reason, I thought we had cleared the most difficult part of the journey, but I forgot which line we needed to take to get to the TEAM center and needed to find map of the train routes (I remember them being everywhere in the past…). So, Rett and I circled the train station trying to find a map of the JR lines (Japan Railway vs. Tokyo Metro Subway). We didn’t find one, but we did find a “route finder” kiosk, which printed out a nice little receipt with directions on it.

I didn’t want to change trains at Shinjuku station (It is big and very busy), so we tried to use an alternative route. This probably would have been fine, except our little directions didn’t say if we should be traveling towards or away from Shinjuku at one of the interchanges. After staring at a sign for a bit too long, a nice, English-speaking, Japanese man indicated which line we should take to get to Mitaka station (our last destination!), and we eventually arrived at the station without any further trouble. On exiting the station, we easily followed the directions to get to the TEAM center, until we decided to walk on the wrong side of a row of trees. This meant we missed our turn and had to backtrack. We paused a little too long at one intersection and kind, young woman from Toronto offered to look up our address so she could point us in the right direction. We quickly found the TEAM center, and got into our rooms for the night. Phew, it only took 4 hours and 45 minutes from when our plane touched down for Rett and I to get to our destination…

Life Lessons:

• Pray often.

• Always bring snacks.

• Print off a map of the train routes before arriving in Tokyo.

• Expect to do nothing the day you travel overseas, except travel.