Getting to Japan the long way….

I have never written a blog before and really all I want to do is to record things that have interested me and maybe give you a sense of our ‘adventure’.

If there are any rules to writing one I will undoubtedly break every one of them. There will be no literary flourishes or clever bits to try to allure a massive following (as if). It’s just for friends so please set your bar as low as possible.

Breaking up the journey at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow not only was the cheapest option but did help in reducing the impact of a long haul flight.

It added hours to the journey but I think by breaking it up we weren’t quite like zombies by the end of it. Interesting as well to have the juxtaposition between Moscow (albeit just in the airport) and initial impressions of Japan. A lack of warmth or desire to help seemed to pervade our short sojourn in Moscow whereas immediately in Japan we have been blown away by the enthusiasm and friendliness of the people. There felt a certain amount of soullessness from our brief touch down on Russian soil. I remember reading some interesting words by a Russian writer, Yerofeyev, to paraphrase, he said ‘we are a people, we love those who are similar to us, we don’t need the dissimilar ones’. I think we got a real sense of this. But who knows what a further foray onto Russian soil would reveal and maybe I am being overly harsh. But mostly it was a sense of ‘the computer says no!’

Not all was bad, the food options were interesting, although seeing TGI Friday and a Burger King there was a let down. Pete did get very excited about a cheese dish he had previously sampled years ago in Hungary that had a very similar Russian counterpart.

Other options were to put it mildly very worrying….

Bear meat, boar and horse were also all available.

I have subsequently tried to look up bear consumption in Russia but the search keeps coming up as ‘beer’. It would be interesting to know how much bear actually gets in eaten, my hopes are not much but who knows!

The second leg of the flight was much better. On flight entertainment was good and at one point reduced me to tears. I think jetlag or something similar had set in when I started to bawl part way through watching Bohemian Rhapsody. Then boredom set in and I got overly involved in a Liam Neeson film.

Food on board was pretty bad and made worse by seeing what the person next to me was eating. We ordered ‘Asian vegetarian’. Vegetarian became vegan and the interpretation of that was bizarre. So for breakfast we were given fried rice and soggy vegetable spring rolls drenched in a sweet sauce, whilst my neighbour tucked into porridge and fruit. We did eventually get our order swopped, but only after I asked to flight attendant if there was any chance we could forego the delights we had been given.

On a plus we did keep the fortune cookie we had also been given. I am uncertain if a fortune cookie is something that is on many Asian breakfast tables but it was a lovely added extra.

The words were very poignant as this year has been on many levels really hard but working towards this trip has kept me going.