Happy New Year

You heard it it, straight from Shibuya, via the future.

Christmas '09

Christmas turned out to be great in the middle of nowhere. Emily and I spent Xmas eve in her town, Iwaizumi, and went to a restaurant/bar called Miyo-chan. Great start - we ordered some fried eggplant, tofu, and some basashi (aka raw horse meat), which was all very well prepared. Had a few beers to chase it all down. Right as we were finishing, however, the owners came up to us and invited the two of us to attend their little christmas party, conveniently being held in the booth next to us. Aside from Emily and I, there were 4 other people: the 2 proprietors, and 3 of their friends (one of whom's daughter I teach at Kita apparently). So of course we obligingly move ourselves over to the other booth, where they immediately break out a grill, what seems like an endless amount of lamb, multiple bottles of beer, whiskey, and sake, and some of the best if not the best homemade pickled vegetables and dried persimmons. The lamb was by far the best, as we set it on the grille for no more than 20 seconds at a time, searing the outside perfectly while the inside was still left raw and tender. Applied a bit of the soy based sauce following, and that was that. Spent the night eating, talking, and eventually trying our hand at karaoke. We even got presents from them, and I hadn't ever met these people before.

Woke up the next morning at about 830, walked around town a bit. While Emily contests that Iwaizumi is at the depths of boredom and solitude, its not without its charm. Situated in between 2 mountains, the first and most obvious thing about the place is the extent of the sheer natural beauty surrounding you. And with the trees lining the mountains, I can only imagine the effect those leaves turning red in the autumn can have on the place. Anyway, we walk around a bit, grab some breakfast at this quaint little cafe, stop by a DIY crafts shop that I'll definitely be back to, and then head back to her place to grab her car in order to go to our first real destination of the day, Ryusendo Caves. While we didn't actually enter this time (she's a bit strapped for cash and the entrance fee is 1000 yen), the surrounding scenery is sufficient enough to sate any appetite for that special kind of Japanese nostalgic beauty that you see so often in movies and paintings. Ryusendo is, in a word, gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. Little streams running all around, trees spaced sparsely but affectively, there's a kind of lonely beauty about the place, esoteric in the way that it feels like there's a history there that can only be touched by certain initiates. But looking on it with those naive eyes perhaps makes it even more of an experience, allowing you to retain the awe of something so seemingly pure. And pure it is: Ryusendo is famous throughout Japan as one of the largest underground limsetsone caves, with what is considered some of the purest water in Japan (they have a thing for water up here). I tried some - its ok. Tastes like snow.

From there, we drove about 40 minutes north to Unoso, some cliffs overlooking the ocean that are very well known as a popular suicide jumping point. Fitting, considering the holiday, right? Apparently, the Japanese have quite a bit of superstition concerning that area, as in there's just something about the place that draws one to its edges. Suffice to say, that kind of occult shit intrigues the hell out of me so I was all smiles when we got there. And, as it turns out, there is no more beautiful place in the world than Unoso. Words fail in this case, so I'll leave it to you to decide what you think after looking at the pictures that follow. Funny though, when we were leaving a cop was walking towards the cliffs, asking if anyone else was there. Presumably, hes checking for suicide cases.

From there we went to my favorite kind of onsen (hot spring), and that is the homely kind. Small place, wanting for any serious decor, but nevertheless exactly what I needed after a day of hiking. There's nothing like sitting in a hot spring by yourself outside staring at the moon at dusk. Got out, drank a beer and had some onigiri while waiting for Emily, and headed for Miyako, where the Christmas dinner of Christmas dinners was just waiting to be assembled...

Pretty much the same menu as I offered a few days ago, but for clarity's sake, here's what I prepared:

- Seared Yellowfin tuna with simple tomato-cab-garlic-chili-pepper reduction as sauce, topped with caramelized onions.
- Bean sprouts, carrots, cabbage with boiled mackeral, and topped with cucumber and shiso, a bit of chili oil.
- Mashed potatoes (with soymilk and margerine) and broccoli, with wine & garlic aus jous.

Bangin'. I'm eating leftovers as I type this. Drank some wine, watched the Its Always Sunny Christmas special, and went to bed.

Christmas Eve






Ryusendo










Unoso

Winter Break

Free as of 4 PM yesterday, until the 12th of January. KILLER. Everyone in town except for me and a woman who works in Iwaizumi about an hour and a half north of here are back in their homelands, so looks like she and I are going to be doing whatever the hell it is we do in Miyako a lot for the next week.
I'm thinking of cooking dinner for Christmas, which'll be a bit of a challenge considering the space limitations (not to mention lack of cookware), but so far I'm considering the following:

- Poached cod or red snapper with a mildly spicy tomato reduction, topped with caramelized onions.
- Shredded mackeral & bean sprout "salad" topped with grated shiso & cucumber and a bit of chili oil
- Mashed potatoes with broccoli, garlic & red wine aus jous. MAYBE throw my favorite mushrooms in there, but I'm pretty sure those are going to be pretty difficult to locate up here.

She suggests we go to KFC. Even if I habitually ate meat other than fish, that sounds like a terrible idea.

But yeah, I think that Christmas'll be pretty rad up here - nice and quiet, spent with new friends in a new place. Its funny how into Christmas the Japanese are without having the basest understanding of what the holiday means. Not that I care for the underlying religious theme, but I at least know of it. The Japanese, on the other hand, just love any reason they can get their hands on to throw up stringed lights and blow-up dolls of American things.

Speaking of Christmas, for my senior class yesterday I taught them about "The War on Christmas." Reason for that being, I was teaching other classes about Christmas in general and wanted to recycle as much material as possible. Turned out to be a good class, though a bit difficult for the students (a surprise considering they've consistently surprised me with their rather high level of english comprehension).Basically, I used that idea to introduce the concept of free speech and had the students write their opinions on that topic. I tried to be as objective as possible, but its near impossible not to point out, at least subtly, the inherent moral flaws of our nation's "greatest" right-wing thinkers.

There are a lot of reasons I like living in Japan, but one of them definitely has to be that I don't have to deal with those jokers on a daily basis.

Other news: Considering going from beard to Allman-Brothers-meet-Lemmy from Motorhead.

The Real Deal

So I'm going to rescind that last post, attributing it to what I have decided may or may not be the first signs of a slight case of culture shock. If I were living down south, near a larger city, I imagine I wouldn't be so... I hesitate to say bitter... put-off, but the truth of the matter is - I've never lived in a tiny city far from anything at all resembling my former hobbies and habits. So of course an adjustment period is to be anticipated. And the last post was a bit of a lie anyway - I do have prospects for a social life, and those will be detailed forthwith.

First and foremost, here's a cool/probably-incredibly-surprising bit of news: I've just started practicing with a BREAK DANCE CREW. Huh? Yeah, for real yo. I've actually got "practice" in a few minutes so this post may end up being a bit short than I/you'd like. But yeah, what the hell is an inflexible person like me doing in a dance crew? You got me, but the dudes and chicks in it are pretty cool, its pretty good exercise, and more than anything I figure its high time I learn how to school an opponent on the dance floor. Practice is held in this incredibly large bar, as far as Japan-standards are concerned, with an older woman tending. She's cool as hell, talkative, and is real keen on giving us samples of local spirits/wine. I can tell you right now, don't even think about trying Iwate-made red "wine". If I 'm not mistaken, they just got an empty wine bottle, filled it with Thunderbird, and slapped a nice-looking label on it. Dreadful stuff.

This is a bit tangental, but its also worth mentioning I had my first BOE-viewed class on Wednesday. I wasn't particularly worried about it before hand, having had all my prep work done for quite some time, and afterwards, having heard the results, was more than pleased with my reception. HOWEVER. Interac paid me a wonderful call not 2 minutes before the start of that class with some news concerning water, burst pipes, and my apartment. Talk about serendipity. I wouldn't call my class anything close to a fugue state, but that's not to say I was really paying attention to what I was doing, concerning my brain-power to thinking "shit, what's broken...?" Fortunately, they lied. I got home and nothing was leaking, wet, or showed any signs indicating anything at all had been/continued to be wrong. I'm still not really sure what the fuss was about, but I know that whatever it was it wasn't my fault, and it also explained my water bill for this month being astronomically high. So that worked out well.

Gonna cut this short - gotta go make an ass of myself.

Starting to Get Bored Up Here

Wow, there's really nothing to do in MIyako aside from work-related things. Can't wait to get myself down to Tokyo for New Years, though it looks like itll only be for a few days. I should probably start looking for jobs down there too...

Long Time

So I guess I'm not that great at updating blogs frequently. Scratch that, I'm not great at updating THIS blog. Sorry. Anywho, I'm up in Iwate-ken, Miyako-shi (岩手県宮古市) and have been for the past 2.5 weeks. I started teaching on the 16th, so I'm almost done with my second "full" week of school (Japan has SO many national holidays, and this week was no different so that I had Monday off). Its been real good so far, though of course minor mistakes have been made, but who didn't see that coming?
I'm working at 3 different highschools: Miyako Koukou (koukou means highschool), Miyako Kita Koukou, and Miyako Kawai Koukou. I teach at Miyako Monday-Wednesday, Kita on Thursday, and Kawai on Friday, and these schools couldn't be any more different: Miyako is, for the area, a very academically-minded kind of school, with most if not all of the kids trying to get into decent universities. As a result, their English ability is, while obviously not great, pretty damn good for their age. The past 2 weeks have been the semester-end testing period, so this week I was grading tests. That proved to be an interesting task, considering I'm pretty sure that a few, though not many, questions were grammatically incorrect, and also considering that a number of questions had multiple, grammatically distinct, possible answers but only one was right. In the end, I was a bit confused about the whole process only because I felt like I had been shorthanding some of the students due to the strict nature of Japanese grading syllabi.
Then there's Kita. I'm not sure if they take tests. Kita's basically the punk's school, and I don't mean that in the Ramones/Sex Pistols sense, but rather they don't give a shit about what they learn, and I wonder if even one of them has post-high school plans in the realm of education. Its also a bit smaller than Miyako (which is, as far as I can guess, probably around 800-1000 students), at around 500-800 students. Pardon the french, but its a fuck ton of fun - while actually adhering to a proper lesson plan there is next to impossible, if you can ride the wave its actually possible to get information across to these kids where a more rigid teacher would be stuck. What does that mean? I can talk about the Steelers and Pens a lot more than I normally wold be able to, as well as music; basically pop culture is the key to success there. Plus they like my beard.
Finally comes Kawai, which is closing at the end of this year. As such, despite its already being a small school, the only students left there are seniors. This means I have a grand total of 40 students to interact with at that school. The kids are interested in learning, though, unlike Kita, and so while the classes are small they are also much more focused. I don't have much of an impression yet, however, because the only time I've been there was last Friday which happened to be a testing day, so I literally went there, having already prepared my introductory lesson plan, and sat around all day doing nothing. It wasn't much fun. And kind of hot. Plus its 800 yen and 45 minutes away, so I more or less felt like I wasted my time.
But what about my life outside of school? Its not bad, though weekdays are mostly devoted to prepping for the next day. Its a nice, small town, full of restaurants with that-day-fresh seafood (I'm about a 20 minute walk from the ocean), and surrounded with ski resorts, beaches, onsen (those Japanese hot springs that I'm sure yr all familiar with), and apparently a real cool cave about 2 hours north of here... so basically its the exact opposite of Tokyo. Its different, yeah, but that' not to say I don't enjoy it - hell, I love Hikone, where I studied abroad, and while that's closer to a big city (Kyoto/Osaka) by a long shot, its way more rural than here. Or at least as rural. If there's one reason I'm bummed about being all the way up here (I'm about 5 hours north of Tokyo), aside from the fact that most of my friends live in Tokyo, its that while I was down in the big city I was doing a pretty decent job of getting myself connected with promoters and bands. Hell, I had an opportunity to try out for my absolute favorite band, Church of Misery, but then I got placed and couldn't go to the audition. Lame. Ultra lame. Ultra fucking lame. But you know what? I'm young, 23 to be exact. I took this job as a way of getting myself over here, and I figure that I can spend some of that time out here in the sticks. I'll be back in Tokyo at some point kind of soon (sorry to all you folks who thought I'd be over here for only a little/thought I'd be coming back to visit the states regularly), and I'm gonna enjoy the ride before, during, and after that time. Here's to me finally getting what I wanted, living in Japan. Cheers.

When Shit Hits The Fan, Nothing is Safe

Ugh, so I've had my first bout of... everything-bad-that-could-happen-happeneditis. From last Friday until today (Wednesday), I have had 0 contact with anyone via technology. Last Wednesday I took my computer in to the Apple Store in Ginza to try and get it to stop crashing, and while my computer is now fixed (or at least so it seems thus far) it took them exactly 1 week to accomplish that. Something about my logicboard being totally fucked. So that by itself isn't so bad, but paired with my phone falling out of my pocket at a concert, it gets much much worse. Then, pair that with trying to get a new phone but having softbank (phone company) finally realize that I have ~$750 of debt owed them from my last stint in Japan, and that unless I pay that I can't GET a new phone, it gets even worse.

But hey, I'm still alive and getting by, so lets talk about good things, right?

The concert I lost my phone at was for a band called Corrupted. You probably don't know them. If you do know them, though, I can't imagine how jealous you are of me having seen them live. And they played for 90 freaking minutes, starting off with El Mundo-fucking-Frio. The show was at a pretty hip joint out in Kumagaya, and that was a bit of a problem in itself. See, on the train maps, a lot of stops are written only in Kanji (chinese characters), and that's no problem by me - I can read most of the stops. Buuuuut, there is a place that is called Kumagawa (熊川), as opposed to Kumagaya (熊谷). Kumagawa is kind of south-westerly of Tokyo and to get there from where I live in Chiba you have to transfer.... 4? 5? times. Kumagaya, on the other hand, is north-north-westerly of Tokyo, and from where I live in Chiba I can take 2 trains to get there. So when I was looking for the map, obviously I was looking for the character 熊 (kuma), but unfortunately I went with the first place that started with 熊 that I saw, which was Kumagawa and not Kumagaya. I realized this only when I was about to arrive at Kumagawa, which is about an hour and then some outside of Tokyo. So, long story short, instead of spending maybe an hour in transit, I ended up arriving at the concert at about 730 PM where I had left at ~3 PM. Ridiculous.

But back to the show. There were a few alright opening acts, none particularly memorable but sufficiently down-tuned and bass-heavy, but this night was more or less given to Corrupted, as it should be wherever they play. A lot of people have misconceptions about metal, mostly centered around the fact that without any knowledge of the various different subgenres contained within, you can't really begin analyzing the numerous aspects of that most unholy of monikers (METALLLLLL). There's thrash, death, sludge, fantasy, prog, heavy, and many more, but the most affecting of them all, in my opinion, is the one known as doom metal, and this is due partially to its black-sheepish-ness. A lot of metal IS played fast, this is no lie. Doom metal, for the most part, lies outside of that realm. Where Napalm Death said "we can be mind-boggilingly technical and STILL be all kinds of bad ass", Doom opted to pursue the almighty riff that bands like Sabbath and Zeppelin put to use (mostly leaning towards the former), so instead of executing you with a flurry of searing solos and yelped/grunted vocals, Doom seeks to crush yr will to live by dragging you down to the deepest, darkest depths of an ocean of tar. What that all means is, Doom tends to be much slower than all other kinds of metal, and delivers its brutality through detuned guitars, sunn amps cranked to 11, and the patience to meditate on a riff or even single note instead of working the fretboard; it is the definition of "heavy".

And Corrupted is the king of Doom. Though they are Japanese, they choose to sing mostly in Spanish (don't ask me why), and have looooooong segments of quiet accented with the pluck of a string here and there. Time ceases to exist with these guys, and they'll lull you into a false calm for great lengths of time, and then kaBAM, they stomp on their pedals, and with pick in hand stroke, one, two or maybe even three of the most dissonant, soul-crushingly heavy progressions, and all the while they have become loud enough to skin a goat. Their vocalist has an impressively deep voice for this kind of music, and while the long passages of him uttering incomprehensible bubbling-oil-speak are interesting by themselves, they serve merely to accent they sheer monolith of sonic doom that this band creates. Theirs is a music that goes beyond words, that describes something of the human condition so deep and dark that language ceases to suffice and all we are left with through their music is an impression that evil exists, and that something is very, very wrong. Its quite moving, and totally metal.

So then Halloween was the next day, and I spent most of the night at a bar in Shinjuku called Current. When bands tour in Tokyo, they tend to end up at Current, so a lot people there are in the know and are relatively connected. I went there with a Norwegian friend, Chris, who's in a band called Zombie Blasphemy. Not too much to tell, met some new people, danced with some ladies, drank beer, put lots of fake blood on my face and arms, you know the routine. All in all a real fun night.

Sick!

I'm pretty sure I'm sick. I can't be sure,probably because I haven't been legitimately sick in god-knows how long, but I know I my nose is congested, I'm coughing and sneezing a lot, and my head hurts. Good thing I'm not placed otherwise I'd be tempted to take a work day off (ししし). But other than that things are going super rad over here. Since I'm trying to find a real job aside from this McJob of Asia that is "teaching english", I've been doing a bit of mixing business and pleasure and have started connecting with some bands and some promoters during and outside of concerts, and they've been introducing me to other's in that scene. There's one guy especially, puts together a lot of shows in Shinokubo's Earthdom, that really knows his stuff and he's been quit forthcoming with the probably-juvenile questions I have about getting shows put together/asking bands to come over from abroad. Its going slow, but I'm learning a bit and, at least, meeting a whole slew of different people so I figure its a pretty good thing I've got going (plus being guest-listed drastically reduces entrance fees).

But for the most part I'm still bumming around Kashiwa, bidding my time in the company of locals and co-workers while I continue to wait to be placed. Its not bad at all, and I decided, at least for now, to stay up here rather than move down to Tokyo proper - why? I figure even though I'd be spending a good deal less on housing, I'd be spending a lot more on everything else, and its also kind of a pain in the ass because I'd have to re-register myself at the post-office/bank, and with the local authorities. This is made doubly painful by the fact that its probably at most only for a few weeks, and I'd prefer it if things didn't get lost in the mail etc.

Escapades

Recap of recent events: a coworker got fired, I sat next to Sumo on a train, I saw a really drunk Japanese guy get ultra-manhandled by the cops, someone rolled in vomit, I ate Whale, and I'm still not placed. Crazy times over here, fortunately nothing at all bad has happened to me. I haven't yet moved, but am going in to talk to the guy who is subletting the house tomorrow at about 10 AM. Its in Denenchoufu, which is actually a pretty wealthy area, and also houses a number of politicians, PM Hatoyama included.

I got some new cans today, so now I can boil 3x as much water. This is a very good thing, considering I also decided that instead of eating instant noodles all day everyday, I should be eating more fresh vegetables and fish. So Now I get boiled vegetables and fish. Simple? Yeah, but hey it gets me by, especially considering that after 8 PM most of the fish in the supermarket is marked of half price. For example, I got about a half pound of norwegian Mackerel for about 2 dollars. And there are always wicked cheap vegetables to be had at the end of the day.

I'm getting really bad with this not posting pictures thing.

Oh, and in about 2 months my friend's having a boy (holy shit I have friends who are pregnant and married??) and that boy will be dressed in the best steelers-baby-clothes that money at Kohl's can buy. Go Pittsburgh.

It's been a while

Sorry about that. Was I busy? Was I working? was I out too often? Was I sitting in my room? I can't really tell you - its been going by pretty fast up until now. I was placed as a sub for this week (last day is tomorrow) in a middle school in Otsu, near Kyoto. Ridiculous part is, not only did a girl I was friends with at training get placed in the same city, but I also studied abroad right near there for a semester, so I'm very comfortable here. And so far, I've been having a great time - all the kids are realllllly excited over me, and the general way things work is that a horde of little girls will come up to me, giggle for a bit, and then say "Ku-ru" or "kakkoi" (yr cool), and then ask me a bunch of questions and get excited about my answers (you should've seen their faces when I said I lived about 2.5 hours away from Lake Erie - totally, and 100% over-the-top hyper-excitment. I thought they'd break glass with the shrieks they let out), and the boys generally ask me 2 questions, one always followed by the other: Do you like X? Do you LOVE X??? They pay attention though, and are mostly pretty good students (though a few will be not-asleep, but catatonic in their decisiveness to remain silent and non-participating).

The teachers I'm with are all wonderful, though there is one who makes me... uneasy. She's not mean or anything, but there's just something about her teaching style and overall demeanor that throws me off.

So on to the interesting things in the classroom during my week in Otsu. There are 2 that are worth mentioning, and I'll do so in chronological order. The 2nd day I was here, I learned just how inept I am at drawing, especially on a chalk board. During an introduction to the kids, I mentioned that I like playing guitar, and then went on to try to draw one on the board. What resulted went beyond innuendo, or even being suggestive, and was really just offensive. It took me a minute to realize what exactly I had done, and upon doing so quickly erased it and moved on, but there were a few kids chuckling to themselves, wondering if I actually had just drawn what they thought I had just drawn. Fortunately, nothing came of this.

Number two was way less funny and almost tear-jerkingly sad/awkward. Today (thursday), I had to teach a class that had as part of their schedule a test on how they had done memorizing a short story. It was called "A Mother's Lullaby," and was about a dying little girl sitting under a tree holding a smaller, dying-er (later dead) boy looking at all of the charred bodies shortly after the bomb had dropped on Hiroshima. What made it worse is that this class must have had a lot of kids with allergies or something, so AS I'M BASICALLY YELLING AT THEM (you have to speak loud to be understood) ABOUT HOW THE U.S. NUKED THE SHIT OUT OF THEIR GRANDPARENTS THERE ARE A BUNCH OF KIDS WITH THEIR HEADS DOWN (reading) AND SNIFFLING. I'm not sure exactly what the word is to describe how that felt (or the ensuing test, which was student after student coming up to me and reciting one of 4 passages from this story), but it was weird, and it was very bad.

I guess its also kind of ironic that just before I came to this middle school, I found and started to really enjoy a band called 中学生棺桶, or Middle Schooler's Coffin/s. I get to see them live soon!

Ramen

I figure I shouldn't buy anything substantial in the way of home furnishing/decorating/usefulness, so until I'm placed I'll be eating 100 yen ramen with water I've boiled in a used soup can.

Moved In (Kind of)

So now I'm in Chiba. A small town called Sakasai, to be exact. Not a bad spot, pretty residential though. The only problem is that Interac is kind of taking us for a ride on this one - our station is about a 50 minute ride outside of Tokyo, and we're here because of the living costs of the big city. Right now, on a pro-rated quasi-lease, we're paying 81000 Yen/month, which is OK for the Tokyo area but ridiculous for the family-friendly suburban area we're holing up in. And I'm probably going to be here for 2 months or so (granted, at that point it'll be more or less Interac paying for me to live here without me doing any work). It's a big chunk of change out of my pocket, and I'm a bit put off by it, so me and a few other co-"workers" are scoping out some other options.

Oh,, but the real kicker for this week is the holiday: Including the weekend, its 5 days long, and only because in Japanese law (so I hear) if there are 2 separate holidays with one day in between them, that middle day must also be taken off. Normally, this wouldn't suck (again, in Tokyo everything would be more or less OK), but out here every bank and post-office (aka bank) is closed until Thursday, so I can't exchange bills, cash travelers checks, or even charge my credit account for a withdrawl. So at the moment, for the next 2 days, I have about 4K Yen in my pocket. Doable, but annoying.

Week's End

Its about 5:45 PM right now, and I just got back from our last day of training, which really didn't amount to all too much: we did some practice lessons in the morning, but it mostly amounted to the trainers telling us about housing (which is changing tomorrow - we're all moving to apartments in Chiba (its way cheaper to live outside of Tokyo than to live in)), and then a guy who runs a mobile phone business through Softbank (a cell provider in Japan) that provides foreigners with cheaper deals. I waas about to hook myself up with an iPhone, but then I thought, "there's a 5 day holiday break coming up and I can't cash any travelers checks during that time. Do I really want to throw down a good 150K Yen on something that I can pick up when I'm much more economically and geographically stable?" So I held off, and am, thus, still phoneless. Its not so bad... I'll just mooch off of everyone else who did buy a phone.

Who knows when I'll be placed, probably pretty soon. Gotta run, we're all headed to Shibuya. I'll post pictures at some point.

Day 1: end

Pretty good overall. Training has been encouraging about most everything, but especially about who it is we're teaching and why. Just as I'd hoped, we have, to a diluted extent from the norm, the same kind of social standing as actual elementary, middle, and high school teachers have - we are responsible in part for the upbringing of the kids we'll be teaching. Maybe this doesn't sound so great from an American POV, but Japan treats their teachers as a kind of third parent (the cases are many where kids have gotten in trouble and their homeroom teacher has heard from the cops before their parents had). To be a teacher, of any sort, in Japan seems to be much more valued than it is in America, and to be a part of such an intrinsic part of the Japanese socialization system sounds pretty exciting to me.

But that's enough about that -training was really just a bunch of talk. Afterwards (we began at 9:30 am and ended around 4:30 pm) we headed back to the hotel. Usually train rides are stupid packed and uncomfortable, but not only was that not the case here, I had a little japanese kid com up to me on the train and say in a kind of awe-inspired whisper "kakkoi," which more or less translates to "cool." So we got back, all took a shower, and split up into I guess two groups: there are maybe 3 or 4 people in our group of 12 that (2 of whom are married) kind of go their own way, so they went off an did their own thing, and the rest of us once again split up - one of the brits here went to play soccer while me, a canadian guy, a woman from seattle, and a lawyer from texas walked to Akihabara, which is about a 35 minute walk from our place.

Akihabara is, for those of you not in the know, a two-fold mecca: first and foremost, it is the center of geeky-anime/otaku culture. There are cafes where you actually go and pay for cute little japanese women dressed in maid outfits to be coquettish, or, for lack of a better term, bitchy, to you (but in the end they make nice). There was a 6 story "adult" store with some things I'd love to mention written on the windows, but knowing who might be reading this I'll leave them to your imagination... if its that good. So we walked around, got some food (I talked it up with some Tokyo locals (oh, I didn't mention I'm one of 2 out of 12 who have even a basic knowledge of the Japanese language, and it gets to be a huge hassle takings separate orders and requests from 5 different people at once)), went to an arcade, and then walked back in something of a downpour (we're poor enough to avoid the train when we can). I was surprised to find my absolute favorite Japanese stew-of-sorts, Oden (normally a mid-fall to mid-winter kind of thing), and picked some of that up. All in all a pretty good day.

Jet lag is definitely catching up to me, so I'm going to call it a night and try to get a good 9 hours of sleep.

1st Full Day

I got into Narita yesterday at about 6:30, and, much to my surprise, disembarkation went through very smoothly. Actually getting on the plane was quite another story: I had an original itinerary from Pittsburgh to Chicago to Narita, and while those airports didn't change, the times sure did. I started out (of course) around 7:30 at Pittsburgh Int'l Airport, where my flight was supposed to leave at 9:30. It left at 11:30. My flight from chicago left at 11:20; never mind the time difference, I wouldn't have made it, so I necessarily changed my flight from Chicago to Narita, which was, at first, not available. Finally, United throws me on an American flight, one that leaves me with about 25 minutes to get from the Pittsburgh flight arriving at O'Hare terminal 3 to the Narita flight that is in terminal one. I made it, sweating, a bit short of breath, and probably only because of what was announced two hours later while we were still grounded waiting to depart: the plane was broken. That flight was intended to depart at 12:50... we left around 4:30.

So, all in all, America left me with what I expected, a sour taste in my mouth.

But Japan, this land of superior efficiency (that's probably a bit of hyperbole) raised my spirits upon arrival. Getting from the plane, through immigration, to my luggage, and then to the meeting point for us Interacs took all of maybe 45 minutes. The only hitch was there was another employee arriving at about 9 PM, which meant that the rep from Interac had to stay to meet them. This didn't really prove to be much of a problem, though, because the combined knowledge of Tokyo between another employee also there and I meant that we just left the guy there and made our way to the Asakusa Central Hotel, where I am sitting typing this right now. Oh, but I did have to leave my 2 largest bags for a company to haul over here today, because there was no way in hell I would be dragging what amounted to at least 150 lbs around for the apprx. 1.5 hours it took to get from Narita to the hotel.

When we arrived, (a bit short on cash I must say, out of the 19K Yen I brought in cash, I've spent 10K on travel (well, 2K of that on dinner)), I got into my disorientatingly small room, unpacked what I had on me, took a shower, and went out to dinner with the woman I came to the hotel with around 11 PM. I went to bed at 1-ish, woke up at 5 (jetlag isn't too bad, or at least it isn't yet; I'm rather excited to get this process under way), read a bit, got some green tea and onigiri (rice balls, in this case with pickled plums in the middle) for breakfast, picked up an undershirt but no belt (i forgot to grab those things out of the suitcases I offed on the delivery company), and started up this blog. Its been a lot of work, I guess, thus far, but hey I just moved here and have only a nominal idea of what's gong to happen over the next 4 days.

I'll probably head out with "the group" after day 1 of orientation today, and hopefully I'll get over my fear of being "that guy with the camera" and take some real touristy type pictures of, at least, Kaminarimon Shrine near here. You think you've seen big, red asian lanterns before? Psh, you have no idea.