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.