We should have known it wouldn't be that easy

Turns out I was wrong.  I got to know the real Japan just a bit better.  Our flight was scheduled to leave at 6:15. Shortly after 6:15, they announced that there was a problem with the fuel that they were working on fixing.  We sat as they called in maintenance.  After a bit of waiting, they turned on the in flight entertainment.  I watched Quantam of Solace, interrupted every 15 minutes or so with helpful updates such as, “Thank you for your patience.  We apologize for the inconvenience.  It has been 15 minutes since our last update.  At this point in time we still haven’t solved the problem.  We are talking to maintenance and they are helping us solve the problem”, followed by very confidence-building announcements such as, “Well, we’re going to try to move the fuel out of the center tank, and then we’ll give it a try.”  Give it a try?  Please don’t take any risks on an airplane flight, thank you very much.

 

 

I finished watching Quantum of Solace.  They were still giving us extremely helpful updates.  “We are now headed back to the gate to take off” “It turns out, the problem was not fixed.  We will now be offloading. “  We will not be offloading yet, we’re going to try one more solution”.  We waited through close to 2 hours more of false alarms and very unhelpful announcements as the atmosphere on the plane got more and more tense.  Finally, at 10:30, after sitting for more than 4 hours on the runway, we walked back into an airport that looked eerily familiar.  United put us up at the Norita Hilton overnight, where we had free dinner, two 3-minute free international calls, and NO free internet.  The free dinner happened to be spaghetti- we came the whole way to Tokyo to eat spaghetti?  Oh well.  It was pretty good.  We finally got to bed around 1am, and had a wake-up call bright and early at 5:30.  Our plane starts boarding in 33 minutes and we should be in Taiwan around 12:30.  I suppose by the time this is posted, we’ll have much more exciting news to post, since we should still be meeting Sarah-Grace TODAY!