Brought the Lunalapin deck with me so that’s what we’re sticking with it for a bit.
For context, before I decided to experiment with different decks, the Lunalapin deck was the first one I used in this blog, I believe the first entry is me explaining why I chose it.
Today’s reading is warning me about being hasty, just… in general, really. Don’t count the chickens before they’re born, don’t exhaust yourself, don’t spread yourself too thin, just Don’t. Pace yourself. Dumbass.
Kinda funny how the moment I shift to a familiar deck (that I keep in my backpack all the time, incidentally) the advice becomes so blunt.
Today I woke up holding my breath.
I’ve got no idea why, but the moment I snapped awake I was holding my breath for some reason.
Regardless of how, I woke up at a good time that allowed me to take it easy at home before leaving… Which is good because I had one too many “almost forgot” moments.
Almost forgot the deck and mat I wanted to bring to the trip, almost forgot my snow shoes, almost forgot my phone, almost forgot the boarding pass I printed in advance. But I didn’t. My luggage was also shockingly light considering I packed ostensibly the same stuff as always.
I make good time to the station and take it easy on my way to the airport. There’s this area right before the bridge to the artificial island with KIX in it called Rinku Park that I always go “Oh I wanna go there” when I go to the airport and always forget.
I have like two hours to go so I go get lunch and I remember about the ferry that goes from Kansai Airport to Kobe Airport and I wonder how silly I might feel when I return. I might take the scenic route via ferry and then from Kobe to Osaka.
We’ll see.
After lunch I decide to just go through security and whatnot and it all goes so smooth… I don’t know if it’s from traveling with ANA instead of Peach Aviation or what but everything is going so well that it scares me, I’m NOT used to things going so smoothly.
Then the flight gets delayed 20 minutes.
Then I get an email explaining “depending on the weather we might need to fly back to KIX or stop in Haneda”
THERE IT IS, now I can be at peace.
Now that I think about it, it’s been a long while since the last time I boarded on the main terminal. Peach is cheaper (for reasons I’m becoming more aware of by the minute) and is also always leaving on terminal 2.
Eventually I finally get in the plane, I start to disassociate while listening to a book on the history of WCW and I hear “Pika!”.
Turns out the boarding procedures announcement had Pokemon stuff. I knew that was a thing but forgot both that it existed and that it was an ANA thing specifically.
The fight went by real fast reading Three Kingdoms.
I love Zhang Fei so much.
Everything kept going smoothly……. Until I had to get train tickets.
I go to the ticket window, and while walking to the line I ceded my spot to a young couple also getting there (in that “hard to tell who was first but you go first” way).
I need to go to Otaru, and there’s a rapid that goes straight to Otaru but the next one (at that point for 4:50) has few seats left.
The couple takes like 5 minutes trying to figure out how to get their tickets, the staff finally comes help, then they take an extra 5 minutes getting the tickets for some reason.
By this point the 4:50 train is full, next one is at 5:30. Because of that I went from waiting 30 minutes to waiting an hour.
Now, I’m a foreigner in Japan, I know all too well what it’s like to be lost and take too long for simple tasks, that’s not my problem, hell I don’t even care about waiting longer all in all. This all rubs me the wrong way for two reasons.
The first is that the girl didn’t apologize, nod, or in any way acknowledge “sorry for taking so long instead of letting the line continue while I figure out what to do” the way people often do for less than this. She instead seemed to go out of her way to avoid any eye context which is understandable but wrong.
And the second THEY WEREN’T EVEN FOREIGNERS, so I can’t mentally justify the faux pas as the normal gaijin unawareness, and on top of that I had the one Japanese couple in all of the country that lacked tact AND ticket picking experience I guess.
Honestly, if they were unaware I would’ve been like whatever, but the fact that there was clear shame but no shame-related apology is probably what’s annoying me.
At least the karmic ledger feels balanced for me.
ACTUALLY YOU KNOW WHAT? I would’ve accepted all the perceived transgression no problem if the girl was wearing a skirt and/or heels, and you wanna know why? Because women that can walk on heels will always have more dexterity than me and anyone that can wear skirts in this cold ass weather intimidates me.
BUT NO IT HAD TO BE THE KIND OF GIRL WITH BAGGY PANTS LONG JACKET SNEAKERS AND BIG ROUND GLASSES INSTEAD.
Ok now I’m done.
The moral here is that apologies go a long way, even a simple nod acknowledging the inconvenience caused.
Once in the train, the road is sloooooooow, not helped by the fact that the train had to stop because of… loss of signal?
At this point it’s like 6PM and I’m exhausted, but when I arrive, I see that the area looks… awfully familiar…
Deja Vu! I’ve been here in this place before, actually. Last February when I traveled with a friend to the mountains at… around this time too, actually, we stopped here before going to Chitose Airport. I think I also stopped here when going to Tomakomai two years ago? Not so sure about the last one.
I checked in at the hotel which is, conveniently, about 10 minutes in a straight line from the station and decided to get food before I pass out. On the way I saw glimpses of the Lights Festival thingy that I chose Otaru for and I’m getting excited.
I went to a nearby KFC and it was full, mainly foreigners struggling with the machines, and oh would you look at that, they apologized when they took too long to order!
I go to my machine, order my burger and I keep hearing a beep… turns out one of the foreigners before me didn’t pick a 100 yen coin so I got 100 yen off my order!
There’s apparently a port nearby, I’m definitely exploring that tomorrow.
oh also at some point in the middle of all this I doodled this absentmindedly in procreate.
It might not look like much, but in the past I felt “stuck” doing exercises not daring to draw anything proper.
Turns out the key is to tune out and not think too hard, go figure!