Our flight from Toronto to Tokyo was quite pleasant. Air Canada made us feel comfortable and despite being stuck in a middle seat for just over 12 and a half hours it was a good flight.
I happened to sit beside a working holiday resident from Osaka who was currently studying in Toronto. We had some conversations, such as how bad the instant noodles were and how they should have tried better since it's a flight to Japan. Apparently he'd never been to Tokyo in his life, and had no desire to visit. There's no love lost between Osaka and Tokyo and they're rivals at everything.
For entertainment purposes I barely managed to contain my laughter while watching Inside Out, Pixar's latest animated outing. Highly recommended. Terminator Genisys, not so great, but fine for getting rid of a couple of hours on a flight.
We flew up across northern Canada, over Alaska and then spent a reasonable amount of time over the mountainous wastes of north eastern Russia. While the view through through the clouds was spectacular, the thought often went through your mind of "if we go down here, no one will ever find our bodies."
This route had the great advantage of our flight to Tokyo taking us down over the length of Japan. When the cloud parted you could get good views of Hokkaido, the northernmost island, and it's peninsula that points towards Honshu, the main island of Japan.
Flying down the length of Honshu you could see the tall mountains with towns and cities crowded in wherever there was flat space. Large rivers denoted collections of civilization and the urbanization of everywhere you could see was apparent.
Once we got to Tokyo we had to circle a couple of times before we got our landing clearance. This was not a particular hardship as it meant a good view of Tokyo itself and the harbour. Tokyo sprawls. It really sprawls. It is urban and buildings as far as the eye can see. When they run our of space, they simply demolish a mountain somewhere and put the contents into Tokyo bay creating new land for construction. Much of the bay by the city has been taken over by these artificial islands, and surprisingly they're not unpleasant, but more on them later.
Finally though we arrived at Haneda airport. If you've never been to Haneda it's a slightly smaller airport than the huge Narita that is the main port of call for overseas flights and is mainly used by internal and east Asian carriers. While it is international, it's not its primary focus.
Landing at Haneda seems to result in an extremely long taxi to the International Terminal which is conveniently located as far from the runways as possible. And of course we landed on the runway furthest from it. This meant that just getting to the terminal took almost an additional 20 minutes after we touched down.
One good thing from the long taxi, we saw ANA's R2D2 painted plane in celebration of the new Star Wars movie coming out later that year. Which as a huge Star Wars fan and plane nut, was cool. Well for me anyway. No? Okay, moving along.
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