Nippon it in the Bud

Okay, I'll admit I have been a little nervous about my upcoming trip to Japan, even though my travel companion  -- my daughter -- is a savvy teenager who is well equipped to navigate unfamiliar waters. Even an airport in a place that is halfway around the world and filled with indecipherable symbols instead of letters and whose clocks suggest it is closer to us than it is to Hawaii even though Hawaii sits right there, a short swim away, in the very same ocean.

I was getting better though, even coming to grips with the whole insolvable math problem that is the international dateline, feeling flush with an armload of yen that, because of another kind of baffling math problem known as international currency exchange rates, makes me feel like I have somehow come into a bit of good fortune. Funny that money would be called yen, although I suppose the word has a different definition across that damn dateline.

Feeling better, that is, until my son (the sole reason I am taking three flights and crossing imaginary crooked lines and counting on wads of monopoly money to get me through) sent me a very helpful email instructing me how to get from the airport in Osaka to Himeji, the town where we will, theoretically, find both him and the hotel whose name I can't pronounce where I think I have a reservation, though not necessarily on the right day. The email contained a link to a bus schedule, which seemed to be a good start. And, truth be told, the bus schedule alone would have seemed to be self-explanatory, as it listed, in English, departure times from the airport and arrival times in Himeji, along with some town with an odd sounding name on the way.

But my son decided to be helpful and elaborate. After first explaining why we would be taking a bus rather than the world renowned bullet train (the bus would be faster -- WTF?) he gave us step by step instructions on how to take a bus in a place that is, much to my surprise, apparently a third world country and not the highly developed leader of the civilized world I had thought it to be:

You can purchase a ticket in the airport (just run around yelling, "basu kippu" and someone will point you in the right direction), and then catch the bus from terminal five at the airport, which is easy to find as I recall. When you are getting on the bus, just yell "Himeji" indiscriminately until someone confirms that it's the right bus. 

Again, WTF? There certainly seems to be a lot of yelling, and I have a feeling after twenty-five hours of travel (time travel, no less, as I may have mentioned I still am not sure what day it is supposed to be when we arrive in Japan, and not even my new best friend Siri on my brand new iphone can tell me) when I yell "basu kippu" it's going to sound a lot like "where the fuck can you buy a bus ticket around here?" And, unless my daughter is willing to step on a bus and yell "Himeji" indiscriminately until someone confirms we are on the right bus (I ask you, how will we be able to tell the difference between a confirmation and an announcement that we are disrupting the peace when we don't even know what day it is?) we are screwed. Given that my daughter gets embarrassed if I speak above a whisper in a public place, it is quite possible we will end up on a boat to North Korea rather than a bus to Himejii, which will certainly make the international date line and currency exchange problems look like child's play.

I don't know, maybe I'll feel more calm if I just pack. But what's the rush. We may be leaving tonight, but in Japan that's tomorrow, so we have plenty of time.