For those of you unable to enjoy hanami cherry blossom viewing today, you can live vicariously and see people enjoying the hanami at Shinjuku Gyouen in Tokyo on Google Maps. (I’ll be there later today!)
(Google maps’s totally lame iframe tags can’t be embedded here, so the above is a jpg; click the link to interract with the map.)
Yesterday morning, a Fedex plane crashed and burned in Narita airport in the airport’s first fatal accident since opening in 1978. You can see commentary-less footage from the BBC (which cannot be embedded) at this link.
I flew into Narita yesterday early afternoon just hours after the crash, and noted a bumpy landing — the plane shifted left and right after touching down — and the pilot then told us the news. We were lucky that we were in a Boeing 777, as larger planes had been unable to land because the runway was out of service. We saw the morbid wreckage as we moved towards the arrival gate, and I took a picture of the plane from the terminal.
