I left for the CAADRIA conference in Japan on Monday 27th March. It was a 3:30am start to get the 6am flight to Sydney before jumping on a Japan Airlines flight to the very cool Kansai Airport near Osaka. The flight into Kansai was late and consequently it took an hour to get through customs as a number of other planes landed at the same time. I got through customs at 10pm and found that the bus I would be getting to Itami Airport where my hotel was near would not leave until 10:30pm and wouldn't get there till 12am. Rather than spend more time waiting in the airport I got a room in the hotel inside Kansai airport, cancelled my other hotel and got to bed at a reasonable hour. The coolest thing about the hotel (apart from it being inside the airport) was the crazy super-toilet which resembled an ejector seat and had just as many options (spray, clean, water pressure).
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Travelling between Kansai and Osaka airport in the morning rather than late a night was very worthwhile. There was lots to look at and a good nights sleep and buffet breakfast had cleared my mind. Kansai Airport is a large artificial island miles from anywhere (a lot like Hong Kong airport) so a good 20 minutes of the journey was spent just going over the massive 10 lane bridge joining it to the mainland.
The flight to Kumamoto was funny. On takeoff and landing the movie screen showed a camera view out the front of the plane which then switched to a downwards facing camera view soon after taking off. Coming into land there was a lot of low cloud so we were flew in pretty low and because of a hill the pilot couldn't just fly straight in, he had to do a 60 degree turn and then land. Thanks to the video screen we are seeing all the action as the pilot made this turn onto the final approach. Somehow he managed to completely misjudge the turn, leaving us well off the runway flightpath but headed directly for the control tower. Throughout the cabin there is all this mumbling in Japanese and then the engines roar to life as we buzzed the control tower at about 100-200ft (which in a 767 is pretty cool and very close). It reminded me of playing around in Flight Simulator with the language set to Japanese and the reality settings maxed out :-)
My first impression of Kumamoto is that its the Japanese equivalent of Hamilton with a castle in the middle. It is not built up like a major city and it is surrounded by rice paddies and aggriculture plots. Fortunately within central Kumamoto the street names are given in Japanese and English which makes navigation a little easier. My room at the Ark Hotel is fairly decent, the hotel has reasonably nice decor and it is central. The hotel has free, unfiltered (all services not just web) Internet access within the rooms which is brilliant as I can do work in the evenings as the television here is very weird and difficult to understand.
Outside my hotel, some very tight carparks