Flying to Osaka
For a long time, we were paranoid about how the kid would behave on a plane. But then we realised what a baby did mattered less than what the parents did in response. As long as you made good faith — or at least visible — efforts to keep your kid quiet, the people around you are usually forgiving. And besides, you’re graded on a curve; your kid doesn’t have to be absolutely quiet, she only has to be quieter than other kids on the plane.
On the fourteen-plus hour flight to Osaka, our daughter was a champ. A slightly high-maintenance champ, but a champ nonetheless. My wife came more prepared than a troop of Boy Scouts, though, with several little surprise toys or activities to keep the kid occupied: new sets of stickers, a toy plane (that was too loud, I thought), and the killer, a tiny disposable set of modeling clay, bought for all of sixty-five cents at some hippie card shop down the street.
Other things that worked:
- getting the bulkhead seats, which gave us enough leg room for the kid to sit down on the floor for a snack picnic. There was also enough room to take the car seat out for a while and let her use just the big kid’s chair. [Note: the first three side rows in Economy Plus on our United B777-Heavy were apparently crew seats, and they came equipped with extendible leg rests, a business class-y bonus. Check seatguru.com to see if you can identify and book the best seats on each type of plane.
- we pre-ordered kid’s meals, which makes sense, even though the kid didn’t eat the hot dog or the hamburger. She did get lots of raisins, though, and the waffles were a much better breakfast option than instant ramen.
- Though she slept so hard on previous trans-Pacific flights that people asked what drugs she was on — nine-to-eleven hours each way — this time, she fought it, hard. Net: she slept for about four-and-a-half hours total. She stayed awake on the seventy-five-minute train ride to Kyoto, and sacked out immediately when we got into our hotel, at about 10:30. Five hours of sleep.
Kyoto, the hotel: My wife’s people booked us into the Granvia, a relatively nice hotel right in the Kyoto train station, a cavernous, open-air atrium of black granite-and-glass with a giant LED Christmas tree. In the hotel lobby is another Christmas tree, covered with those white feather quills like you see at wedding books, pungent enchantment lilies, and… test tubes filled with what looks like crack.
Hmm. that sleeping on the plane thing didn’t quite work out. The kid woke up at three a.m. At around 5:30, after a couple of hours of unsuccessful coaxing, my wife bundled her up and took her out around 5:30, walks the dark, empty streets of Kyoto for three hours. There are no bagels in Kyoto, at least none within a two-km radius of the train station.
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