Woohoo!!!!! A new country!!!!!

A week in Japan is just what I needed to lift my spirits from the sudden arrival of miserable cold weather in Munich. So off I tootled, to visit Stephen in Tokyo. (After seeing him at Justin & Sam's wedding the other week, it would have been majorly rude NOT to go and visit him...)

The excitement started early on in the trip, just two hours after leaving Munich in fact. Because I had to negotiate the giant dog turd that is Heathrow Terminal 5. I had a four-hour wait for my onward flight to Tokyo, so I was a little surprised when the lady at Munich check-in stuck a "fast connection" label on my bag. Well, it wasn't long after arriving in London that I realised she was in fact right to do it. What chaos!

As I stood, lost in the huddled mass of transfer passengers being squeezed through makeshift corridors of pointless waiting and herded up the single - yes, SINGLE - escalator to the needlessly complicated (and queue-stricken) x-ray arrays to enter the terminal proper, I was personally ashamed on behalf of my country of the shambolic passenger management on display in this, supposedly Britain's flagship airport terminal building.

Once I was through the baggage screening, my shame turned to despair: where were the signs??? I couldn't even find my way to the toilet without walking all the way up and down the whole bloody building! This terminal is the bastard son of a shopping centre and a slaughterhouse. The one bright spark in an otherwise unremitting black hole of glitzy nothingness is a branch of Wagamama, where I promptly calmed my nerves with a serving of their chicken soba noodles.

Oh, and on my way under the runway to the sub-terminal from which my flight was leaving, I was amused to see emblazoned proudly on a glass wall that Terminal 5's luggage conveyors whizz bags at 30mph (that's 50 km/h). No wonder that BA managed to lose everyone's bags when the terminal opened, I thought to myself. That thought would come back to haunt me...

Anyway, the flight in the jumbo to Tokyo was pleasant enough. I had a seat free next to me, so there was plenty of stretch room. I think the 12-hour flight would have been much less bearable otherwise. And the views across Siberia and Russia's far east were spectacular in their vast wintriness: endless forests blanketed with snow; anonymous rivers cutting their way across the plains; saw-toothed mountain ranges without a sign of human intervention.

I watched two films during the flight: Mamma Mia, which was good but not that good; and Wall-E, which was simply mindblowingly amazingly fantastic! I wept buckets. It's a real tear-jerker (okay, some of you know that I blub at the slightest invitation - but Mamma Mia just didn't get me going at all) and I highly recommend it.

And then, suddenly, there I was in Japan! It having been a reasonably short-notice decision to come over, I hadn't had much time to form any ideas of what Japan was going to be like. I read the opening chapters of my newly-acquired Lonely Planet on the plane, but I still felt massively underprepared. Which is how I always travel, actually. Still, it meant that I was in that over-alert state of excited dread, adrenaline more present in my blood than on a normal day, with everything burning a little brighter in my mind's eye. Even seeing a Starbucks menu in weirdy Japanese characters was thrilling!

Stephen had kindly emailed me instructions on how to get to him in Tokyo, so I had no difficulty getting my bus ticket and hopping on board at the bus stop just outside the terminal building. I even managed to sleep a little on the bus, once the novelty of the traffic and pointy hills and oh-so-slightly different architecture had worn off. Then Steve met me at the hotel which was the first drop-off point for this particular bus, and we walked to his palacial flat on a quiet hill, set between a temple and the residential compound of the American embassy. A lovely spot. It was easy to close my eyes and forget I was pretty much in the centre of this throbbing megalopolis of 35 million souls.

After a quick coffee, we headed out for a bite to eat (locally it was now lunchtime on Saturday; in my body it was about half past unconscious). Steve took me to a smart-looking tonkatsu restaurant in Roppongi, just a ten-minute walk from his place. The food - a pork chop breaded in something resembling superfine cornflakes and served with shredded white cabbage & a variety of dipping sauces - was absolutely delicious, but possibly the most delightful part of the meal was the bowl of steamed rice that came with it.

The Japanese take their rice very seriously, I knew that before I flew, but I was unprepared for the delicate perfection of these pearls fallen from heaven into my bowl. Each grain seemed to encompass the breadth of rice experience! Sticky yet smooth, soft yet with an alluring resistance to the tooth, at once neutral and full of flavour, they clung to my chopsticks and unleashed a tsunami of pleasure in my mouth.

Steve had to meet some friends of his that afternoon, so he headed off and left me to fend for myself, alone in a strange country. I thought I was up to it, but in fact the sleep deprivation of the flight got the better of me, so I headed back to his place and sank into a welcome sleep.