We arrived at Narita airport at around 11:00 in the morning. The airport was big an airy complete with all the latest technological gizmos like plasma screens and interactive displays.

Narita Waiting Escalator

http://daviding.com/

The flight was long and boring, 7 hours of flight time really sucked out all the energy from both of us. Me and my best friend Ivan couldn’t wait to come outside breathe in that warm Tokyo air and smoke a cigarette at the same time (kind of an oxymoron!). But we were in for a big surprise as soon as we got off the long “walking” escalator we went into the immigration “room” which was a huge hangar like place with a line up of around 500 people.

We waited for around 1.5 hours and were pretty disappointed by the fact that foreigners had the least amount of workers tending to them. The native Japanese had a very small line up compared to ours and were being processed much quicker than us.

Good thing we became acquainted with a Chinese girl on the plane, she was sitting next to us and I made a comment about her “derriere” to my friend saying that it looked pretty nice at that point she turned around and said “oh you guys speak Russian?”, I almost fell through my seat because of embarrassment but we soon learned that was quite friendly and very well educated. She was the type of girl that seemed to have a “hippy” mindset, the type of person that if you yell at her she wouldn’t yell back, she would probably just ignore you or feel disappointed.
I love that kind of people. In the line up she kept telling us about the different Russian poets and literature. She had an incredible amount of knowledge on the subject and even recited several poems in Russian, the time seemed to fly in her company.

When I got to the window a masked government worker glimpsed at my passport, glimpsed at me without lifting his head and made an almost rude like hand gesture: “go!”. There was no friendly greeting from him but I soon discovered he was an exception to the rule…


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