March 29th, arriving in Tokyo

Hello Japan! (Kon’nichiwa Nihon)

Getting to Japan takes more time than it used to as Russian airspace is not available anymore. That meant we had a long journey ahead of us. We got up at 6 and left for the airport at 7:30. As we already checked in online we could go straight to baggage drop-off and then on to security. As it wasn’t busy we had plenty of time to eat our breakfast before going to the gate.
The last few weeks Finnair used an Embraer 190 with 100 seats but yesterday and today they made the “short” 2.5 hour flight to Helsinki with one of their large (336 seats) A350’s. We were lucky to get OH-LWO which has the Moomin livery. It’s the same aircraft that would take us to Tokyo Narita later in the day.
We went through border control when leaving the Schengen area in Helsinki and took off on time flying North over Svalbard, continuing North of Greenland and Canada, just missing 90 degrees North towards Alaska.
Staying out of Russian airspace again we continued Southwest towards Japan.
After 13 hours in the air we could put our feet back on the ground.

Since Japan opened up for tourist again only recently getting through all the red tape at the airport took a long time. First checks were made for vaccinations, the it was time for immigration where it took 2.5 hours just to get our passport stamped, or better, they put a little sticker inside. At last we could get our luggage which we found unloaded next to the baggagebelt since it took so long to get there
At last we could clear customs and get on our way.

We got tickets for the Narita Express, a non-stop train that brought us to Tokyo station in 55 minutes. We decided to walk the 800 meter distance to our hotel so we would at least have some exercise.

We left our stuff in the room and went out for dinner hoping to walk to the Imperial Palace to view the lit cherry blossoms but by the time we walked all the way underground through Tokyo station it was raining too hard. Too bad, we’re leaving here