Our first day in Japan was not our smoothest arrival. Our flight got us into Osaka (the second- or third-largest city, depending on how you count) at 10:30 pm local time. Check-in at our long-stay apartment-style hotel closed at midnight, and a cab was supposed to take half an hour, so we needed to make it through baggage, immigration, and customs in about forty-five minutes – something that we had managed to do in multiple countries on this trip without incident. Alas, this was not to be in Osaka, where the immigration line took over two hours! That’s right: hundreds of people waited in one big room for several hours – though about a dozen windows were open, and most people had their forms pre-filled out. We’ve since heard that it’s one of the worst immigration lines in the world, though many don’t believe it because of the Japanese reputation for efficiency.

We had the misfortune of picking the line with the slowest immigration agent in Osaka, and the stubbornness to stay in his line even after discovering his speed. (Hope is the last to die, alas.) By the time we made it through immigration, it was almost one in the morning. Then, we retrieved our bags from the conveyor to discover that one of the straps on B’s backpack had been slashed either by security or by baggage handlers. There was no one from the airline to rope into our minor calamity, so we just hightailed it through customs. It was now approaching two in the morning, and we had been up since 8 am.

Now, it gets fun: the Osaka airport is on an island of sorts, connected to the mainland by a thin highway. So, while it’s only a half hour car ride away from the city, it’s not exactly near anything. The subway stopped running around midnight, and the bus towards the city had a long line that had been there a while. There was exactly one hotel at the airport itself, and it was so fancy that I didn’t even want to walk inside it with my backpack on. (Luckily, we got a full refund for the cost of it! Thanks, AirBnB!) We got the hotel’s last available room and promptly collapsed into bed. It was three in the morning.