Beau's Blog

It’s 11pm on May 21st and I’m in bed at my Airbnb in Hino (western Tokyo) listening to Muse and feeling self inflicted pressure to catch up more on my blog.

Apr 30, 2023 | Final Lil American Day

It felt familiar to wake up in my hometown of Los Gatos – yet unfamiliar to wake up in Los Gatos but in a friend’s house on the other side of town. Mom and I ate a small breakfast, drove over to Frannie’s where we picked up Frannie and Grandma Vicky and then dropped off Grandma at Caltrain for her to go back home to San Francisco. Frannie then took us to SJC for our flight to Japan. Thank you Frannie for dropping us off and looking after my car for a couple months! Mom and I hung out in the lounge waiting for the flight. Worse than expected: scrambled eggs. Better than expected: grapefruit/orange juice mixture (fun fact: Dale and I called this a “Beau Dale” back in college when we’d make them in the UCLA dining halls).

Note to self: eat more next time before an 11 hour flight. The flight was our first time flying the new airline: Zipair. Like many other low-cost airlines, you have to pay for each “add on” like picking your own seat, food (yes even for an 11 hour flight) and more – although inflight wifi is free. Everything said and done, the experience flying Zipair one way to Japan for ~$400 including addons left me content to fly with them again. My plan being tired for the flight worked out great as I ended up sleeping the first half of the flight. I took a break from sleeping to eat meh salmon shio koji. Maybe it was a good thing I didn’t eat too much earlier since hunger is the best condiment after all.

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May 1, 2023 | Tokyo!

The day started as we crossed the International Dateline somewhere over the Pacific. I actually don’t remember if I watched any movies on the flight. My typical go to move for long flights is to sleepily stay up binge watching mediocre movies and totally forget them. I figured sleeping, writing or doing about anything else may be a better use of my time. We arrived at Narita airport, breezed through customs and immigration and then made it onto a train bound for Tokyo!

We made it into the city where we stayed with our friend Miyoko. She delighted us with an impressive spread of inviting dishes. (Her son Yoshi and I have been friends since we were 3 years old and I’ve always loved her cooking!) Both Miyoko and my mom are bilingual and they decided to go with speaking Japanese so I got to immediately work on my Japanese. Since Japanese is quite challenging for me and being tired from the travels (started feeling very sleepy around 730pm), I was pretty quiet at the dinner table. Regardless, we had a great dinner and it was clear to me that I was very fortunate to be in Japan!