We spent Friday evening with our friends Nancy and Robert at the W Hotel Westwood. After a long, delicious dinner, we wandered around with the glitterati of LA (well, the W-glitterati) in the hotel lounge and bar before retreating for post-dinner beverages in our room.

On Saturday, my brother Pat joined us for breakfast before he set out for Austin. He's decided to bag L.A. and the California experience for Austin, TX and is in the process of moving there.

We got picked up at the hotel right on time and arrived at LAX around noon for our 2:30 flight. I was a bit worried that this would be too early until I saw the line out the door for people checking into our flight.

At LAX the TSA folks do a chemical scan of your bags before checking into the transpac flights. This is not the reason the lines were so long, even for business class. For whatever reason, the checkin process seemed to take forever for each passenger. Perhaps they were running the passport numbers through wants and warrants or something.

Anyway, security itself was not the pain I'd thought it would be. Instead, we had about ninety minutes to kill in one of the most dismal airport lounges I've been in since paying for an Admiral's Club membership years ago.

Unlike the LAX QANTAS club lounge we'd revelled in last December, the JAL/Luftansa lounge is about 1000 square feet. The air conditioning was set to about 78 (it had to be on in some fashion otherwise it would have been warmer) and, being L.A., we had to suffer through the USC-Notre Dame game (sorry Pete, I hear that ND lost).

We finally boarded around 2:00 and had pretty uneventful takeoff and flight, except for one minor thing: It never occurred to me that in 2005 there would be a trans-Pacific airline that did not have in-seat power. Japan Airlines has apparently made the business decision that travellers should not be provided in-seat power. So, my plans for teaching myself a bit of Ruby and playing around with SQL during the ten hour flight were put quickly to bed. Furthermore, my plans to zone out to trance and techno music were also impacted, though to its credit my Apple iPod played for about six hours on the charge I'd done back in NYC before the JFK-LAX flight.

Arrival in Narita was not quite as amazing as the first time I'd arrived (see Superbowl XXXII), more of a mix of planes than the squadrons of 747s I'd seen then. It took about an hour to get through immigration and customs, which was just enough time to miss the 18.45 bus to our hotel. So, we ended up on the JR東日本：成田エクスプレスのご案内 to Shinjuku station. Cab ride from Shinjuku to the hotel was under ¥1000. It's actually an easy walk without luggage, but neither of us had been to the hotel before and, well, we were jet-lagged and frazzled.

The hotel is quite nice, it's the hotel featured in Lost in Translation. Ok, it's an amazing place, but after the flight, and the hassle of getting here (by the way, have I mentioned how its raining here? After 8 days of rain in NYC, we arrive in time for a typhoon to hover off the coast of Honshu for the week we'll be here), anyway....yes, it's a nice hotel, a great view from the restaurant. Probably greater when the visibility is more than 500m.

We walked around Shinjuku station this morning and had a nice sushi lunch at a restaurant in the Takashimaya Times Square complex (タイムズスクエア - 新宿タカシマヤ).

Crashed a bit back at the hotel and are planning to head out again in a bit. Much of what I'd like to see is outdoors and the weather is just not helping me overcome jetlag and the natural tendency I have to not want to engage in touristy things.