Arriving in the Immigration Hall, ‘Er Indoors (of course) headed for the Japanese-passport-holders’ section, where her entry to her homeland proceeded without incident. Then she settled down to wait for Yours Truly.
For my part, I attached myself to the end of a queue comprising, at a rough guess, several hundred people. Part of the problem was the fact that our flight was half an hour late. Had it been on time, I guess I would have found myself in front of many of the people who were now in front of me.
As the serpentine line inched towards the processing area, we passed large notices advising that, as of late last year, all foreigners entering Japan needed to be fingerprinted and photographed.
In some cases the procedure seemed to take a couple of seconds, but by the time I found myself second in line from the processing point and was looking forward to whatever lay on the other side of the barriers the guy being processed in front of me seemed to encounter all sorts of obstacles.
If I didn’t spend five minutes waiting before the opportunity to move into another spot presented itself it certainly felt like five minutes.
And over the forty-five minutes or so I spent standing in line it seemed there had been no more than a single international flight arrive, and I watched as the handful of foreign passengers who’d arrived on that flight disappeared into the distance towards the baggage carousel while I waited for a suitable vacancy to allow me to shift to another line.
But eventually I found my way through another processing point, headed down the passage way, collected the luggage and passed straight through the rest of the process in no time flat.
Faced with revealed form one would have expected further delays from the airport to the hotel, but we arrived at the shuttle bus departure point with about five minutes to spare and the fact that rush hour was well and truly past meant that the scheduled sixty-five minute trip to Kobe’s Sannomiya Station took more or less the advertised time span.
‘Er Indoors, for some reason, decided to install us on the port side of the bus, generously allowing me the window seat, which meant that the first half of the journey had us passing dock-lands, skirting industrial estates and crossing waterways on the port side while the other side of the bus looked out over the fairyland twinkle of a major conurbation.
In fact it was some forty minutes after we’d started when I spotted the first obvious residential building on our side of the bus.
I was just reflecting that one dock-land/industrial area around the world must look just like any other one when you remove the neon signs (and the neon signs were conspicuous by their absence at the time) when a voice from beside me said:
Look over there - that’s Osaka Castle.
At which time I sent an important email to myself.
Self. Next time we take this trip we sit on the starboard side of the bus.
Alighting from the bus at Sannomiya Station, Kobe’s main rail terminal and the hub of a number of transport options it took us a few minutes to locate the departure point for the next shuttle bus, which was going to transfer us to the Meriken Park Oriental Hotel. Since the next bus was due in about five minutes, that gave us the time for a brief debate about the night’s eating arrangements.
There were a couple of options close at hand but I felt that if we went for a look we might well miss the bus and face a half hour wait. In any case, after a substantial meal the previous night and a couple of snacks on the plane (beef rendang and a pastrami sandwich, both of which were considerably better than my previous limited experiences with airline food suggested they were likely to be) it wouldn’t do us all that much harm if we failed to find an acceptable snack option at the hotel.
And if we were going to go hungry there was a bottle of Heathcote Shiraz to deaden the pangs.