Well, here I sit in a darkened airplane. Guess I might as well start something in my impromptu journal.
We're in Tokyo now. We had about an hour stopover before flying on to Shanghai, but they made us get off the plane, circle around the terminal, get back in line and go through the x-ray machines again, so we didn't really have much time to relax. We get on the plane and sit down and get ready to leave, only to get an announcement that they found an electrical fault on the plane. Apparently the elevator for the kitchen is busted and will take about 30 minutes to fix. So we sit. They they decided that they needed to shut off all power to work on it. So now we sit here in the dark. (Well, it's about 5pm so there's enough light from the windows to write. Kind of.)
The flight out was uneventful, mostly. Sixty people all dressed in matching purple shirts and black pants do stand out. Still, after 10.5 hours in the air it gets dull and we start trying to find ways to amuse ourselves. I'm actually rather surprised that no one has brought a beach ball along to inflate and knock up and down the aisles./
We had a very poor landing in Narita -- hit one wheel first and kept rocking from side to side as we tried to slow down. I seriously thought for a moment that we might tip over. Wouldn't surprise me too much if we scraped both wingtips on the runway during the landing. Not a very good start to the trip.
It's starting to get warm and stuffy in here without the air circulation systems going. Somebody open a window!