Home Again

Continuing with the ‘Haneda airport is amazing’ theme, boarding was an absolute dream. Usually you end up having to stand around in a queue for far too long, but they seem to have staggering the boarding right on point. We were only in the queue for maybe five minutes in total, and were soon settled on the plane.

The flight was nowhere near as terrible as the way out was. It felt a lot shorter, too – maybe because we were less stressed this time. What helped was the polite Japanese man sitting in front of us. He asked if he could put his seat back, but then didn’t need to as he didn’t have a seatmate. He instead curled up on the two seats and slept for most of the flight, meaning we didn’t have someone’s seat smushed into our knees the whole time. It was such a dream. We mostly passed the time by listening to music and re-watching some of Chernobyl. I also found where the snacks were kept so we were happy with that too.

The plane arrived at Charles de Gaulle earlier than expected, which was cool. Going through security was awful – the staff were so rude, and kept instructing us in French even though we clearly didn’t speak it, then got annoyed when we didn’t understand what they wanted. I know it was like 5am, but that’s no excuse to be a dick to people. I was really upset by their bad attitudes, and there was also zero screening for the Covid virus. I thought that was a bit remiss as we’d just come from Japan, a supposedly ‘high risk’ area.

Our next 5 hours were spent hanging around the terminal and it was awful. The seats were all hard and insanely uncomfortable, the whole place smelled like a toilet, and nothing was open unless you wanted to pay 2,50€ for a croissant. Eventually a little shop opened, where we had to pay 5€ for a really disappointing sandwich. I seriously never want to arrive at CDG again, it was hideous. It’s so weird because departing from there was fine (or maybe I didn’t notice anything because I was excited to go to Japan).

We got really annoyed on the second flight. It was a smaller plane, and we’d all been herded onto it about fifteen minutes later than we were supposed to - the staff had been hanging around chatting and not actually doing their jobs. The pilot then spent an hour taxiing around the runway and stopping randomly for up to ten minutes at a time. Meanwhile, we had no updates on what was actually going on, and the couple of brief messages we did get were in French so most of the passengers didn’t understand it. At this point I had been awake for over 24 hours and my patience was just gone. Upon saying that, the flight itself was really smooth and quick once we were finally in the air.

Our arrival at Heathrow was surprisingly not too late, considering the runway faffing in France. We got through luggage retrieval and Nothing to Declare easily. There was a leaflet saying to watch out for the coronavirus symptoms, especially if you’ve been to Asia – otherwise we were able to waltz through with no screening at all. It really surprised and annoyed me that airports aren’t seeming to take this thing seriously.

We had to take two coaches to get home from Heathrow. Most of the journey is a blur because I was so tired and over it. Caz dozed and I sat staring at one spot for pretty much the entire ride. After I finally got home, I made it to about 7:30pm and then collapsed.

~

Today I woke up just after 2am and immediately panicked because I couldn’t remember where I was and didn’t recognise my surroundings for a second. I’ve been tired AF all day and slept for most of it, but I stuck to mealtimes in the vain hope that my body clock might follow suit.

I want to start saving money again so I can go back to Tokyo. There’s still a whole list of stuff I want to do and see there. Holiday blues are setting in really badly already, and the coronavirus thing appears to be getting really serious which is worrying and saddening.

A huge thank you to anyone who stuck with me for this mountain of Super Long Posts. I hope someone, somewhere enjoyed reading them. On that note, I’m going to lie on the floor and never write again.