I managed to get the tiniest scraping of Wifi in the airport! Huzzah. Okay, I’ll fill you in on my last day in Japan. It was… pretty dramatic, yet contrastingly anticlimactic.
I didn’t sell anything in the end. I coudn’t be bothered, and as it turned out, I didn’t have time, anyway. But I packed both suitcases, sent three more packages, had my room inspected. Then I cheecked out, returned the key, and I trekked across the city with all my stuff. Didn’t get a taxi in the end. I got several trains and dragged both suitcases the entire way. It wasn’t too bad. Annoying that only one of them is four wheeler, though. Made manoevring very difficult.
Disaster at the airport. Despite me sending so much stuff back, the joint weight of my suitcases came to 40kg, 10kg over the limit, and they were going to charge me $855 US dollars. Yeah, you read that right. You can imagine the squawk in my voice as I repeated it back to them. I was almost going to cry, almost but not quite, when they gave me a Duty Free Korean Airlines bag and said to take some of the stuff out. I’d luckily packed extremely neatly, separating blocks of stuff into separate bags, so I just took a couple of bags out my ‘souvenir’ suitcase and put them in the new bag. I took out exactly 7.5kg, which was torture on my hands. My hands are now blistered red and raw. But better than paying $855. They ignored 2kg out of 3 and charged me only 10200yen for the one kg, which was a win for me with the current pound to yen exchange rate.
They messed about with my boarding passes a lot, and gave me extra baggage allowance coupons to ensure I wouldn’t have to pay again if asked about my overweight baggage. In Seoul Incheon they even went and ripped up my old boarding passes without warning (they’d singled me out to come up to the desk outside the gate for Abu Dhabi), and gave me new ones.
The seats were very uncomfortably packed together on Etihad Airlines. I think I’ve had maybe a total of 1 hour sleep in the past 40 hours. My eyes absolutely burn.
Currently waiting in AUH for my connecting flight to Manchester. It’s 6.50am local time, Sep 1st. My flight’s not for another 4 hours. I’ll update you later.
naiveinnippon 