Here I am – I finally reached Okayama yesterday after quite some travelling. I’d have brought you this article earlier already, if I wouldn’t have been so extremely tired (you’ll know why after finishing this article). So here’s my story of how I got from Hamburg to the city of Okayama.

After having finally organised  all that had to be done before leaving Hamburg, I travelled to the airport at around shortly before 12:00. There I easily checked in – I already had made an online check-in, so I didn’t have to be there too early – and had some time remaining until I could board my flight. So I walked around a bit and had some nice talk about the rebuilding of the ‘Berliner Schloss‘, before I took my way to the airplane. The scanner started beping as I went through it, so they checked me more closely, but it was just my belt – and I had asked them if it would be better to take it of earlier and they said no…

I flew with Emirates, so of course I would have to fly over Dubai, which was the destination of my first flight. Sadly I didn’t have a seat at the window, but it was cloudy anyway, so I spent my time with eating (they served chicken in thyme sauce and chocolate-cocos-cream as a dessert – quite tasty!) and watching movies. I decided to watch ‘Up In The Air’, which was really well done in my opinion and ’2012′ as I hadn’t watched it in the cinemas when it first came out. Not the best movie ever, but it had some pretty nice effects and I like John Cussack

When we finally reached Dubai, I watched through the board camera and it was heavily illuminated out there – even though it was about 23:30 local time. A lot of light smog… The airport was also huge! I was walking and walking and walking and still hadn’t reached the gate for my flight to Osaka. Hamburgs airport is really tiny compared to that. But I had enough time until my next flight’s departure, so I didn’t walk too fast and I’ve even made these (admittedly a bit crappy) pictures for you:

After I finally reached my gate, I exchanged some  text messages with Ruth and then waited for the start of my next flight – which was delayed. There was some bad rain and strong wind going on in Dubai, so we couldn’t start on time and lost about an hour. And my luggage had gotten wet in the rain… but I only noticed it in Okayama :/

Anyways, we started about an hour later than planned and just like in the first flight, I was sitting next to two Germans again – what are the odds of that? I had planned to listen to some Japanese chatting, but I had to pass on that. Instead I watched the movie ‘Juno’ (I don’t know… the only really good thing in this movie is the acting of Ellen Page, but the rest was kinda flat and not worked out enough for me), ate a lot and tried to sleep most of the time, which sadly didn’t work. Airplanes are pretty noisy. But at least I could watch India and China from above through the airplane camera, as well as the sunrise

When I finally reached Osaka, we still were heavily too late and I feared, I might not make it to my bus to Okayama in time. Luckily some nice people gave up their places in the line to help me. After taking fingerprints and photos,  as well as waiting for my luggage, I managed to get to the bus station just in time. It left only about 5 minutes later, so any heavy delay inside would have ment, that I would not catch my bus. And as may mobile phone seems to be receiving no connection here in Japan, it would have been difficult to tell Nozomi, who wanted to pick me up at the station in Okayama.

The bus trip was another 3 hours (Dubai-Osaka were about 8 hours) of travel. I tried to make pictures of Osaka from the bus, but at best they could be described as art. Here’s one example:

As I was already extremely tired, I used the first stop on our way to buy some cold tea, to keep me awake. It was quite bitter, but at least it worked and was refreshing. Finally, at around 22:40 local time, I reached the city of Okayama. My mailfriend Nozomi (I just noticed, that I haven’t made a photo of her… it’ll be in the next article ) picked me up and we walked to her place, because we would have needed to wait another 30 minutes for the train to drive there. We walked about 40 minutes until we arrived there, but it felt good after so much sitting in the last 24 hours. So this is where I’ll stay for the next 20 days:

So, goodbye for now

If you have any pressing questions concerning Japan, please write them in my comments and I’ll try to find out for you