Oh, crap
Spotify $&@# somehow won’t activate. I have no idea why. I made sure everything worked before boarding. So now, the 4 nicely selected playlists I should have had to relax and sleep with with aren’t here. Even worse, my new Mac hasn’t seen a single .mp3 since I got it, and my iPhone has been drenched for bits and bytes to make space for more video and images.
So ironically, I’m stuck with a quite interesting mix of:
- Four mp3s of stock production music.
- A post second world war speech by norwegian king Kong Haakon.
- A stock recording of a hydroelectric power plant.
It’s so funny it hurts.
Tip: Don’t forget about your music and headsets. And if you use that streaming media thing – be sure to activate it!
Plane: Trip 12 hours underway. Getting tired.
It’s 16:14 o’clock in the afternoon, and the fact that we have been at awake more or less since our departure from Oslo at 04:35 is taking its toll. Kari is sitting beside me, deep asleep with a plastic cup of red wine in her hands. Before she went to sleep, we had the Austrian Airways surprisingly good pasta, and a dialogue with the third person on our row. She is a Japanese/Austrian woman on her way to her buddhist order in the outskirts of Tokyo.
And I am trying to find something interesting to write. Partly to get so exhausted trying to find something interesting to write that I will fall into deep sleep, partly to actually find a theme or style for this travel-blog.
…As a matter of fact, I’m succeeding pretty with the exhausted part. Yeah, this’ll do for now.
Time Travelers
We are now also officially time travelers. 15 minutes from now, our time duplicates will walk down the staircase in Oslo, forgetting and we are in the only form of stasis on earth, going back in time. We are now earlier than we were when we left. Tomorrow. No – it’s actually still this morning, we’ll get Harajuku district and our AirBnB hosts.
I have no idea what I just wrote, so I’ll stop there. I think sleep is a pretty good idea by now.
Will report back when more is settled. Oh my god, I am getting so tired. Looking forward to more hunchback / head on a string awakenings.
Getting closer
In the meantime, Austrian airlines has decided to let the whole plane wait in a waiting area designed for turboprop aircrafts, creating confusion and an instant stock exchange for chairs. There are seats being traded, held and shorted between families, couples and singles. The first-in-line people – you know the ones always, treating queues as a sport – a sport where the price is stuff like:
- Sitting next to a power outlet.
- Getting the best comfort and view while waiting.
- Getting the most space for their carry-on-crap in the overhead compartments.
- All of the above.
They are all happy, confident, once again having shown the world that their strategy might not be as stressless, but it gives the best benefits.
Oh, we are actually boarding. Okey dokey.
Phrasebook: Check!
Don’t really know if we’ll use this much, but at least it feels a little comforting, knowing that we have a last resort to turn to when all hope of being able to communicate is lost.
Japan – SIM cards and Internet
SIM-card and pricing
So, you are going to japan and you want to stay connected to the internet, perhaps upload some pictures and short blogposts and Facebook entries to envy your friends at home. How do you do that?”
The cheapest alternative for one 3G simcard in oct’2011 is a rental fee of ¥150/day plus a ¥0.32/data packet. This is a incredibly confusing pricing strategy for foreginers, given that most people don’t even know what a byte is. A data packet is 128 bytes, and 128 bytes is 0.0001221 Megabytes! So a megabyte actually costs you 1/0.0001221 = 8192 times more = 2621 yen/Megabyte! WTF?!
(I have even gone over this calculation multiple times for decimal errors, but the Softbank graphic tells me I’m right.)
So be ware! I have seen several providers giving no real explaination on how much this actually is in normal figures, and seemingly offering no datacap. Luckily, most providers offer some sort of unlimited access. Softbank – has a max price of ¥1500 per day and unlimited usage after the cap. That is not cheap at all, (around 20$/14€) per day, but at least they won’t imprision you for life after a week of periodically checking your mail!