We arrived in Tokyo at 7 am Sunday morning. I didn't sleep much on the overnight flight over, but got a couple of hours sleep when we got to the hotel. I was lucky to get a room with only one other person, another Aussie going to the same prefecture. I heard that other guys were sharing 3 to a room. That would be too much. I am a light sleeper and wake easily, but I bought some really good earplugs and I've been tired enough to sleep well.
Sunday evening my friend Wakana-san came up from Yokohama and took me to dinner, then we went bowling, which was fun. It was nice to have someone here to hang out with. Wakana-san took me to Tokyo DisneySea last time I was here, so it was nice to meet up again.
We went to a Japanese restaurant and they served us a tiny lacquer dish of sake before the meal, I immediately spilled half of it. This was probably lucky since I then didn't have to drink it all.
I haven't bowled in a long time, so after the meal I embarrased myself badly and lost the first game with several gutter balls. Wakana-san did very well and assured me it was a fluke. Then I came back strongly and won the second while she did less well, but perhaps she was just going easy on me.
I bought a Nintendo DS duty free in Sydney on the way through, and then got Wakana-san to help me buy a Kanji dictionary for it in Tokyo. It works out much cheaper than buying the dedicated English/Japanese electronic dictionaries, I just have to avoid buying games for it and wasting my time playing instead of studying.
Orientation runs for 2 days in Tokyo. It has been ok so far, there are a lot of people here, as you can see from the couple of photos. I don't know how many exactly but somewhere between 800 and 1000 new JETs. There are over 4600 JETs currently in Japan. That's a lot of people.
Tonight after the orientation activities was an official function (where they ran out of dessert before I got to it, damn!). Afterwards I went out to a bar with the JETs from my prefecture, this was organised by some of the veterans as a getting to know each other thing. There are a lot of fairly young recent graduates who like to drink, they seem a nice enough bunch. A lot of them went on to an all you can drink karaoke party afterwards, I came home to write this instead.
Tomorrow night is a welcome event at the Australian embassy for us Aussies, there are around 90 of us. Rumour has it that the New Zealand embassy is above a pub, which is probably handy for them.
Things are going ok I guess, seems like after so long waiting for this to happen it's a bit unreal. I expect it will become much more real for me in a couple of days when I get to the tiny village that will be home for the next year.
That's enough for now, hopefully more interesting stuff will come soon.
WEDNESDAY
Not much time to write. Have to have breakfast and check out for the bus trip to Gunma
The embassy function last night was cool. The Aus embassy looks like a fortress. But it was informal as you'd expect. Then it poured with rain and I got a taxi back to the hotel with a veteran JET and a Japanese representative of CLAIR (Council of Local Authorities for International Relations). We had a good talk on the way back and saw the crowds of people frustrated at the train stations. Later I found out the main train line around Tokyo, the Yamanote line, was shut down. So the taxi was an even better idea than we knew.
Have to go, next time you hear from me I will be in the inaka, that is the very rural countryside.
