Day zero

After far too many mishappenings, worries, complications, we made it.

At 9-15 this 28th of December we left our little house and started a long trip to Kyoto.

We did have a last minute excitement: the key of the garage door had vanished. It was eventually found later.

With 6 month’s stuff

As you can see in the photographs, we kept to the strict minimum for 6 months at the other end of the world (hum). What is clear is that moving them (I counted a total of 75 kg) during transit is going to be fun.

Boris and Vikki brought us to Nantes station where we boarded a train for leg 1 which brought us to Roissy Charles de Gaulle.

Ah… Roissy. I always wondered why it doesn’t make the top 100 best airports in the world. Sounds so unfair. If you also wondered, here are three reasons just from today’s trip. I am not sure each of these could not occur somewhere else in the world, but for all three to occur at once, then it is clear: you are in Roissy.

First you disembark from the train and have to go up to the terminal level. But you have 5 bags so escalators won’t do. Luckily there is one lift (actually two per platform). So you go there and find out that a large number of fellow travellers also need it. So you queue for the slowest lift on earth which, when it arrives at your level (1) is full and no one gets out… After a while you find out that the travellers from level 2, if they want to go to level 3, have no other option than to go to 1 first because if not it reaches them full…

After a while you manage to get on the lift but find that you have to leave your trolley to go to the next lift, from which you then take a train, drag your bags, get a new trolley, abandon it a little later and… It seems that the trolleys are assigned to zones so you end up carrying the 75kg more than pushing them!

Roissy: terminal 1

At last you embark the suitcases and go up to the boarding room. Terminal 1 in Roissy is strange. When it was built in 1974 it was very modern: a sort of circular building with transparent tubes containing elevators allowing to move from one place to another. Then satellites can be reached by long corridors: you find the boarding rooms in each one of these satellites. So you walk down the corridor and find out that you are not allowed to go there yet. Back to the shops! What is remarkable is that when you tell someone that perhaps indicating that the satellite is closed before the corridor (instead of just writing “7 minutes” to let you have the number that you are to multiply by 2 to get the total number of wasted time), you just realise that you have once again wasted your time.

A Turkish delight

A stop in Istanbul proved uneventful. Istanbul is clearly a hub between three continents (at least). Planes are flying in and out at all times and the terminal has not only all the western shops you expect to find in an airport but also a huge mass of people going one way or another. Strange to think about it, but this would probably have been the same in the days where it was called Byzantium, and ships would sail up and down the Bosphorus.

A long flight later we reached Osaka, and from there were transferred to Kyoto, which we reached at 8 pm (our time).

To get our bearings we went for dinner and were rewarded with our “little place down the road” which spoke (as expected) no English. The menu was a masterpiece (see photo) but of little information value. We sort of pointed to a rough zone of the paper and we got about 10 pieces of sashimi. With one beer and a tea, this cost us 4300 yens, about 30 euros. We are going to have to be able to do better next time!

And this was the end of a very long day zero.