I am Your Sunshine

A friend msn’d me just now, Sean, said that he’ll be in Cali from this Aug. Oh, it’s gonna be awesome.

It’s fun how we knew each other. We met at Narita. There were five of us. We were among the unfortunate ones trapped in the airport due to the heavy fog in TPE. (This is the part I never got to in my 19 hrs @ Narita Airport post.) I was traveling alone (yes, again), on my way back home from SFO. I was told that my flight was delayed and I was given a 1500 yen coupon for dinner. I don’t quite remember what I did, so I’ll just jump to the part that I found myself in the boarding area waiting and waiting and waiting, until someone sadly informed us that the flight was canceled (moaning everywhere), we have to go past immigration (入境) and the airline will compensate each of us a couple thousand yen for accommodation, which was apparently not enough to cover a night in a hotel.

Then I started to panic.

Where the heck am I gonna stay? There was one lady I was talking to (I was kinda aware of the situation I might be in before they made it official, so I’ve already started to find some ally.) She’s Taiwanese and married to a Japanese and thus she can simply go home. However, it seemed that she had no intention to help a poor, young girl, with whom she shared the same root. (okay, okay. Who’s crazy enough to bring a total stranger home in the middle of the night? But can’t you see that I’m totally harmless?) So I dumped her without hesitation and started fresh.

I located two Taiwanese-students-seem-to-be and approached them, and turned out that they ARE Taiwanese, not students though. I don’t really care what we were gonna do, find a hotel or stay in the airport if possible as long as I’m not alone. As we carried our crazy three pieces huge luggages (3 each person!) to the I desk for transportation and possible hotel info. I saw Rie and Sean talking, looking as puzzled as we were, so I jumped in their conversation and made a proposition. Not that I’m like to pick people up. It’s just that the money the airline “promised” us (they didn’t even give it to us until we got off the plane the next day) won’t cover a night for a room, and poor and stingy (and experienced) like us (we were yesterday students! how extravagant can we afford to be?) would like to get as many people as possible to share a room so that we wouldn’t have to take money out of our own pockets.

Anyways, that plan didn’t work out, so we ended up staying at the airport lobby, which was actually quite romantic in an exile kinda way. You know, normally you’re not allowed to stay overnight in the airport lobby. But because we were the unfortunate plane-got-canceled people, we were granted the privilege to form our little front – two aisles of face to face chairs with luggage carts as our gates. Airport guard approached us a couple of times and walked away with a sorry-to-hear-that smile after knowing that we were those “we were supposed to be on that plane” people. We were tired but we chatted and chatted (in 3 different languages! We all speak English more or less; Sean speaks both Chinese and Japanese and apparently me and the other two speak Mandarin and Rie speaks Japanese.) We shared cookies and snacks and Choya. And we all dozed a bit and then embrace day break (and, of course, our plane.)

[update]
I almost forgot one thing. Between crackers, plum wine and jokes, the lobby manager emerged with a cell phone and asked if one of us is called Ashley (or Yung-Ching, I don’t remember.) Turned out that it was my mom. She was worried so she called Narita airport from Taiwan and they found me! My mom’s awesome, isn’t she?

So many amazing things happen in Narita, and you’re telling me that there’s gonna be direct flight from SFO to TPE from this June. Are you kidding me? I LOVE transfer at NRT ;)