Random thoughts from my first month in Japan

8/1 Sunday: My flight from PDX to Narita was 10 hrs and was not too bad of a flight... I made a fool of myself when I started trying to speak Japanese to the girl sitting next to me who ended up being Vietnamese. The funny thing was, she didn't stop me until I had sputtered through like 2 minutes of Japanese conversation. When we landed in Narita, it was only about 1am Portland time (5pm the next day tokyo time), so I was not feeling the jet lag. The airport process was quite easy since there was a huge line of JETs all wearing purple shirts guiding us around to pick up baggage, and then to the busses.
The bus ride into Tokyo was about an hour and a half, and we arrived at the hotel around 7:30pm. The Kieo Plaza hotel is a huge building right in the middle of Tokyo, and our accommodations were pretty nice. I was placed in a room with 2 other guys from my flight, one I had met, and one I had not. The guy I hadn't met (also from Portland) had a Japanese girlfriend. He pretty much skipped out on the entire three day orientation to hang out in Tokyo with her. On the first night, my other roommate and I walked around Tokyo for a little while and stopped in at the Japanese equivalent of a fast food restaurant. To order food, you place money in a vending machine, and press a button with the picture of the food you want. The machine then prints you a ticket and you then give the ticket to the vendor who delivers your food. The entire process took about 2 minutes. I ordered some kind of beef plate...
We then walked around for a few more minutes looking for a clothes shop for my roommate who had somehow forgotten to pack any shirts in his bag (other than the 1 shirt he was wearing and 1 dress shirt). I don't know how he managed to miss the memo on this b/c they went over the same info at the Portland orientations like 3 times, and included detailed packing instructions identifying all the clothing we would likely need... he also thought we were going to be in Tokyo for just 1 day...so who knows.... In any event, this kid was huge, probably around 6 foot 3 and 250+. Since Japanese sizes run quite a bit smaller we would probably have needed to find some kind of sumo wrestling clothes shop (although its not like they wear much either) Needless to say, at the stores we did end up trying, he could not even squeeze into the XL sizes, so we gave up, and went back to the hotel to sleep.

Orientation
8/2 and 8/3:

We broke off into our prefecture groups to introduce ourselves and get some info about where we would be staying specifically. The rest of the day was filled with hour long seminars on such topics as team teaching in elementary schools, saving money, and even such topics as cooking.
On Monday evening, we had a welcome ceremony toast with various high ranking ambassador types. The food was excellent. After the toast, my prefecture group (Fukushima) had organized a get together at a nearby restaurant/bar. They explained that bars in Japan often offered what is called “nomihodai” or all you can drink/eat for a set price. The cover for this particular bar was 2500 yen, ($30...exchange rate blows right now) For the record, these places are a great deal! For 2 hours, they will serve your group as much food and booze as you can handle... This is trouble for foreigners, and especially Americans since we come in with the attitude that if its all you can eat/drink, then you damn well better eat/drink all you possibly can...