| Japan Trip: Day 1 and 2 |
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I left Bakersfield on the Airport bus and 3 a.m. Saturday morning. From LAX I flew almost 6 hours to Honolulu. My colleague's flight from Seattle was delayed a couple of hours, so I had to mill around the airport until he arrived. His plane arrived about 40 minutes before we took off for Osaka. We flew from Honolulu so we could start in Southern Japan and work our way up to Tokyo. Anyway, we flew nearly 12 hours from Honolulu and arrived at 6 p.m. Sunday night. We are 14 hours ahead of Bakersfield. Being on an airplane for 18 hours is crazy. Needless to say, I didn't sleep much.
I gotta say, international flights are a far cry from what they were 22 years ago, the last time I went to Japan. They have plenty of in-flight movies, music, and video games. No internet though. I am surprised the internet stayed connected without my being on it... that was joke.
From customs at the Kansai airport, we changed currency, rented a cell phone, and exchanged our vouchers for two-week rail passes. We took a train to Osaka, transferred to another train, and walked to the Osaka Hilton. We will be here for one two nights.
I crashed at about 10 p.m. Sunday night. At 4 a.m. I was wide awake. It's like 1 p.m. Sunday in Bakersfield right now. I will probably get turned around about the time we leave Japan on the 24th.
Today we will go back to Osaka station and take a bullet train to Hakata to meet with one of our clients. We leave here at 8 a.m. and travel for two hours or so. We will have lunch with our client then visit some of their end-users. We export forage products from U.S. to Pacific Rim countries. Our client is one of the biggest dairy product manufacturers in Japan. We will arrive back at Osaka about 8 p.m. tonight then we will have some time to relax.
Tomorrow we will meet 4 clients: One in their offices and the remaining at the hotel where we are staying. Then we will take the Shinkansen (bullet train) Nagoya, Japan where we will spend two days meeting with clients and seeing our products in use at some diaries in the Japanese countryside.
My job on this trip is to show our customers our new website and teach them how to use some of its dynamic features. I built in the ability for our clients to see high resolution images of the products we sell. This is important because the cost of shipping samples is expensive and with high resolution pictures, the clients can make informed buying decisions. Many of our clients welcome this change, but some still like samples from time-to-time. I will also ask our clients what we (I) can do to make the website better for them. We are the first company in the U.S. to do some of the website things we are doing, so this is really a big deal.
...and to think it's all because Pastor Jim encouraged me to step out on faith. I just want to say, free-falling is the scariest thing in the world, but soon, you sprout wings and learn how to fly. There is no way I would have ever ende up here without that push... Live by faith, friends, God is in control. He knows your needs. He knows your gifts. He will use you if you let Him.
Blessings! |
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