![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/blog-2023-japan-day-18-20231225_054624.jpg\")
<\/a><\/a>And that’s where we got held up slightly. We’d neglected to find out which of the two wings at Narita the SQ check-in rows were located. So we went to the North Wing, which turned out to be the wrong one. Thankfully, the South Wing \u2014 where the SQ rows were \u2014 was a quick 2-minute walk away. The SQ counter rows had those very familiar self-help stations to print boarding passes and baggage tags, after which we proceeded to drop off our luggage. Then it was departure and carry-on baggage clearance, which was likewise speedy: it took us just five minutes, and would have been even quicker if my backpack with laptops, cameras and all manner of gizmos had not needed a re-scan. And finally, the clearance stage that is always iffy \u2014 immigration. To our pleasant surprise, it was through self-help automated booths, even for international visitors. There were at least a dozen booths and very few persons lining up. Each of us took perhaps just 10 seconds, and by 7:25AM we had all cleared immigration and did the slow walk to our departure gate.<\/p>\n And this is what the departure gate looked like when we got there. Yes, we’d so overcompensated and overplanned: we were the first arrivals at the departure gate at the far end of the terminal, and remained the only passengers waiting for the next 30 minutes! Or maybe this was just a departing-on-Christmas-Day thing haha.<\/p>\n The flight home itself was mostly uneventful. Ok \u2014 except for a relatively noisy family seated six rows ahead of us: the family had a baby who wailed for a good part of the 7 hour 40 minute flight, and a boy who yakked so loudly and almost non-stop that we were able to hear his chatter six rows behind. And congestion over Changi Airport itself meant that we finally landed at 4:50PM instead of the 4:30PM that the pilot initially informed us at take-off.<\/p>\n That’s a wrap for the day-by-day posts for this 18-day trip. The posts have been written very quickly every night, so apologies in advance for spelling errors, statements that contradict each other, and bad use of language elsewhere! I’ll be cleaning up the posts in the days to come, and also start the cycle of retrospection posts on this trip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Our final day in Japan, and this would be a post recording our experiences of arriving at Narita and leaving Japan! Firstly, perhaps it’s a Singaporean thing to over-plan and over-compensate when it comes to traveling. But we had been<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>