I flew from Glasgow to London Heathrow Terminal 5, then took a bus to Terminal 3, then flew to Helsinki Vantaa, then to Nagoya Centrair. Getting from Heathrow Terminal 5 to 3 wasn't as bad as I thought it would be- the website for Heathrow says the connection takes 90 minutes but it really doesn't. The bus stop was a ten minute walk from where I got off the plane, it took about 15 minutes to get to terminal 3. Then I had to go through security again which was a pain but it only took about 20 minutes max. Then I just walked to my gate which was maybe 10 minutes away. Heathrow is vast and it's annoying walking around.
I found security to be extremely rude, not to me, but to a guy in front of me who obviously didn't speak very good English. He didn't understand what the security guy was saying to him and instead of taking his time and explaining clearly, the security guard was patronising, spoke fast, and said things like 'no why are you doing that, did I tell you to do that?' I am not a fan of Heathrow.
I really loved seeing Finland from the air. I didn't know much about Finland, and I was kind of surprised to see that it doesn't look very solid which sounds weird but
My first two flights were with BA and were pretty standard, small cramped plane, cabin crew were friendly enough. I was pretty impressed with my Finnair flight though. Let me show you some of my pictures and videos of Finland and then I'll talk about the flight a bit:
A very good friend of mine said she was worried transferring at an airport in a country where they don't speak English so I took this next photo to show that it's nothing to worry about because there is plenty information in lots of languages at any airport. I've been to Amsterdam Schiphol and Helsinki Vantaa and in both airports they had more English than Dutch/Finnish, and despite not speaking those languages at all, I got around easily. Those airports are definitely easier to get around than Heathrow despite not being in English speaking countries.
So I got on the plane to Nagoya, and the first thing I noticed which I thought was awesome is that they have a camera attached to the front of the aircraft and you can watch what the pilot can see. I watched the sun rise over China.
The plane also has the normal flight tracking stuff, and also these cool dials:
Maybe I'm easy pleased but I really like seeing stuff like this.
I was really surprised, if this flight tracking is correct, we flew over North Korea!
The flight took less than 9 hours, which is pretty bearable compared to the 12 hour flights you can expect from Heathrow. I quite like splitting the flight into sections instead of having one long flight but other people may differ. I suppose it's a bit more stressful having to make more connections, and of course there's one big risk which did not pay off for me: my baggage didn't make it.
Unfortunately my checked luggage is currently lost, and I'm waiting for Finnair to contact me. I really hope they find it because it has all the clothes I own. I am moving to Japan, so it has a lot more than what you might take on holiday. I showed you guys what I packed the other day and if it doesn't show up then I've lost all that. Finnair have told me they will reimburse me 70 euros to buy clothes in the meantime which is pretty nice of them.
Apart from that, my journey went pretty well. I couldn't check in to my hotel until 3pm so I headed over to Sakae to buy some clothes from Uniqlo and sat in Starbucks to use the internet. In a couple hours I will be going for my first day of training so that should be exciting.
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