I woke up early from having a strange dream where I was flying in the Space Shuttle, which wasn't so strange, the strange part was that as we were blasting off, there was some kind of problem and one of the rocket exploded, but the Space Shuttle was able to detach from the rockets and was not too damaged in the explosion. It was a pretty crazy flight but the shuttle was able to land safely. This is not the kind of dream you want to be having the night before you're about to get on an international flight. I was really hoping that I had not developed any kind of supernatural psychic abilities.
Once I was out of bed and getting ready, I was taking a shower when there was a 6.6 mag earthquake about 160 km south of Tokyo. At first I thought that I had just slipped in the shower, but I quickly realized that my whole shower was moving and shaking. I jumped out of the shower and was trying to decide what to do, should I run naked and screaming out of my apartment, down twelve stories and into the street? But before I had a chance to do much the shaking calmed down and stopped.
The Tokyo international airport is is about 60km outside of Tokyo, so to get there you can take a bus or there is a special Narita Express train that goes there. Since I live about a 5 minute walk from Tokyo Station, I decided I was going to take the Narita Express train. I walked to Tokyo Station with my bags and bought my train ticket. As I'm walking to the train platform, I realize that I've forgotten my glasses and all of my bathroom stuff. Since I was pretty early for the train I decide to run back to my apartment to get my stuff. It was a little before 7:00 in the morning, but it was already really hot and humid, so by the time I run to my apartment and back to the train station I'm dripping sweat and my shirt was soaking wet. Even worse was that I got hung up trying to reenter the train station because I had already used the ticket once and unfortunately the time it took to get that sorted out caused me to just miss my train. Lucky the Narita Express runs pretty regularly and the next one was in half an hour, unlucky it turned out to be a longer train ride then I thought it was going to be and I got to the airport about an hour before flight was to take off. Somehow I got checked in, through screening, through immigration and to the gate, which was at the way far end of the terminal, just as the plane was starting to board.
But, so far everything has been going fairly smoothly once I actually arrived in Taipei.
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