Flight Over

Since I've already been here and haven't done any blogging, I guess I need to get going.

June 1- JFK-Tokyo

No pics here, sorry guys. Got to the airport with plenty of time to spare. Packed about half as much luggage as both of the ladies. Win. All seems well until I get on the airplane. Turns out my seat smells a little funny and floor is all wet. And by funny I mean vomit. AA attempted to seat me in a seat that had been puked on and not cleaned. No matter, that just meant being moved to a new seat and receiving unlimited alcohol for the trip. Good deal. The guy beside me (hereafter referred to as my buddy) also got moved to the back of the plane with me. Turns out he is from boston, loves the red sox, skis sugarloaf all winter and is a real wine-o. Needless to say we got along great and it was the fastest 14 hour flight I'd ever seen. I didn't even open my laptop or run out of battery on my quarter charged ipod. I did finish a book though. Truth: They serve sushi on flights to japan.

June 2 Tokyo

Uh, yea. Japan is as strange as everyone thinks. Flying in, the place is extremely well organized. Too well organized, we kept thinking we were going to be lost because its all just too well marked and clear. I've never seen such a judicious use of space. We all know japan makes the most advanced electronics in the world but it turns out they also make the most advanced vending machines and toilets in the world. The toilets play music, have sound effects, auto bum cleaning and look like recliners. The vending machines are similarly spaced aged. There is nothing you can't get out of a machine in Japan. At this point I still hadn't slept in over 20 hours so I conked out on the entire ride to Sinapore. Fortunately I traded a bottle of wine for Andrea's neck pillow which was extremely handy for this leg of the journey. JAL is a pretty good airline but I can't tell you anything else about it since I only woke up for meals.

Singapore

Singapore is a hell of a place. We got in there at 1230am, fresh after 6 hours of sleep and decided the best use of our time was to call up some of andrea's friends who work the graveyard shift until 2am for barclay's to party until our 1030am flight. Needless to say, we got quite the tour. We flipped around to a few foggy, laser addled clubs drinking tiger while malaysians in extremely short skirts eyeballed our crew. Not much different than parts of NYC so far. Then we hit another club which was slightly seedier, but we were assured by our barclay's pals that this was the finest establishment in the neighborhood we were in. I mean, it was on the second floor of a mall a couple stores down from a toys r us or something like that, so how bad could it be? This is when we discovered that prostitution was legal in sinapore and half the crowds in these clubs were prostitutes. To make a long story short, we stuck around in this place, fending off prostitutes, listening to a bad american cover band until 7am. Then we tried to get a continental breakfast at one of the hotels nearby until andrea told them we were in room 415 (hint: there is no 4th floor only like 5-15) So we went to the shangri-la for a 5 star breakfast buffet to sober up. We had some cover here since one of the guys lived there for a month. Then back to the airport and making our last flight by only a few minutes. Somehow by this point I was feeling 100% and didn't sleep. After about 45 minutes in line at immigration we found our bags and met Herni and Cici who were there with our driver waiting to take us to Bogor. Initial impressions- brutally hot. Jakarta is an oven. I don't even know how you stand it especially since nobody has ever heard of a catalytic converter. The place is developing but the roads are massively overcrowded and slums are situated right next to massive multi million dollar luxury condos. What a juxtaposition. At this point, everything reminded me of Rio, from the smog, to the inequality, to the cars and quality of driving (poor).