Our flight to Japan left from Sydney so we flew down early to spend time with Virginia and Sophie (and dog). We were picked up from the domestic airport - eventually. We landed at Terminal 3 and the pickup area for arriving passengers had moved. We trekked through carparks for at least 500m to find the so-called Express Pickup area. This inconvenience appears to be designed to encourage passengers to take the train.
After lunch at Marrickville we returned to the airport to wait in the lounge for our 10pm flight. While we were there we learned our house/dog/cat sitter Patsy (Anita's sister) had a broken ankle! She had "sprained" it when visiting a National Trust site at Dubbo where she stayed on her way to the Gold Coast. After dropping us off at the airport Patsy went for a walk around Coolangatta and realised the ankle injury was more serious than a sprain. She had xrays at Dubbo hospital but the breaks were not picked up. She had further scans which identified the fractures. Unfortunately her ankle has been broken in the past and it still has screws from earlier surgery. We organised some last minute dog walking and other assistance then caught our flight hoping Patsy will cope with generous assistance from our friends.
We didn't get a lot of sleep on our overnight flight, but at least it was incident free. We worked out how to buy a 3 day pass for the subway, caught the correct train and found our hotel without incident. Unfortunately we could not check into the hotel until 3 pm but were able to leave our bags. Breakfast was at Starbucks, lunch at an Italian restaurant in a department store, and dinner was more Italian! There more Italian restaurants in this area than there are in Leichhardt! The rest of our first day was spent walking around the Ginza area and the Fish Market.
Today we went to Tokyo Station to book our long distance train trips using our Japan Rail passes. Lunch was in a French restaurant which was well worth the half hour wait for a seat. There were some astounding buildings on the walk back to our hotel.
No comments:
Post a Comment