I've been refraining from talking about my school, because it seems rude and disrespectful to write about other people, without their knowledge or consent, in such an open forum. But some instances are so common in my daily life that I could be talking about any one of my 370 students, and so universal as part of the JET experience that I could be talking about any one of Japan's 370 million junior high students.
Instance #1 --
Jenn: *says or does pretty much anything*
Students: hysterical laughter
Jenn: *pretends to laugh along, while really wondering what she did wrong*
Instance #2 (also available in separate parts, for an extension of the fun) --
Student: Do you have a boyfriend?
Jenn: That's a secret.
Student: *brief consultation with two other students determines that this means "No"*
Student: Do you like [insert male teacher's name]?
Jenn: That's also a secret.
Student: *another brief consultation determines that this means "Yes"*
I'd love to tell them their logic is flawed, but sadly I don't think their English is up to it.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Matsushima Fireworks and Lanterns Festival
As its name suggests, the Matsushima Fireworks and Lanterns Festival, which was on Sunday (busy weekend) centres around a two-hour display of massive fireworks and floating lanterns. Our trip to Matsushima, however, encompassed oh so much more, largely because we got off at the wrong train station.
Our directions said that the festival grounds were a five-minute walk from the station, but it quickly became clear that we were not five minutes from anywhere. It was also raining again, necessitating a stop in a combini (convenience store) to buy umbrellas. Then we went wandering. Luckily, we had come quite early and so weren't worried about missing any of the festival. Also luckily, it was still daylight. The one Japanese-speaker in the group stopped a woman on the street and asked her for directions.
Instead of directions, we got a three-hour walking tour of Matsushima, including a hill with a thing on top that looked like an ancient rest area, a functional Buddhist temple, the reconstructed house where an ancient royal kept his wives and visiting princesses (which included a cup of green tea and a personalized tour of the attached museum from the curator despite the fact that the museum had already closed), and finally the festival grounds. There are times when being a group of foreigners can really come in handy.
There are other times that it does not. Carnies in America are annoying. Carnies in Japan, all speaking in unison and very aggressively, in a language you can't understand, border on frightening. As did the people who leaned out their apartment windows to stare at us; one person actually went and got a baby to show him the foreigners on the sidewalk. I'm getting used to this sort of thing (I almost caused a car crash walking to work my first day because a driver was staring), but I am still not much of a fan.
The rest of the festival, however, was delightful. We tried a huge variety of Japanese fair food, much of which is not that different from American except for the addition of soy sauce. The fireworks were incredible. I realize I am from a small town, and maybe there are equally good shows elsewhere, but these were bigger, more numerous, and more impressive than any I've ever seen before. Also longer -- we decided to leave after 45 minutes, in part to make sure we could catch the last subway home, but they were still going strong.
I was back at school on Monday and Tuesday, but today is one of my "summer vacation" days -- all the teachers get three, including me even though I've only been here for one week of the five-week break period. So I cleaned my apartment all morning, then walked down to the mall and bought a bicycle (aided by a Japanese-English dictionary that the clerk and I shared) and biked downtown. My bike and I are not in love yet -- you never forget how to ride a bike, but I never learned in the first place how to ride amidst a zillion pedestrians -- but I can tell already I am going to vastly prefer it as a mode of transportation.
Our directions said that the festival grounds were a five-minute walk from the station, but it quickly became clear that we were not five minutes from anywhere. It was also raining again, necessitating a stop in a combini (convenience store) to buy umbrellas. Then we went wandering. Luckily, we had come quite early and so weren't worried about missing any of the festival. Also luckily, it was still daylight. The one Japanese-speaker in the group stopped a woman on the street and asked her for directions.
Instead of directions, we got a three-hour walking tour of Matsushima, including a hill with a thing on top that looked like an ancient rest area, a functional Buddhist temple, the reconstructed house where an ancient royal kept his wives and visiting princesses (which included a cup of green tea and a personalized tour of the attached museum from the curator despite the fact that the museum had already closed), and finally the festival grounds. There are times when being a group of foreigners can really come in handy.
There are other times that it does not. Carnies in America are annoying. Carnies in Japan, all speaking in unison and very aggressively, in a language you can't understand, border on frightening. As did the people who leaned out their apartment windows to stare at us; one person actually went and got a baby to show him the foreigners on the sidewalk. I'm getting used to this sort of thing (I almost caused a car crash walking to work my first day because a driver was staring), but I am still not much of a fan.
The rest of the festival, however, was delightful. We tried a huge variety of Japanese fair food, much of which is not that different from American except for the addition of soy sauce. The fireworks were incredible. I realize I am from a small town, and maybe there are equally good shows elsewhere, but these were bigger, more numerous, and more impressive than any I've ever seen before. Also longer -- we decided to leave after 45 minutes, in part to make sure we could catch the last subway home, but they were still going strong.
I was back at school on Monday and Tuesday, but today is one of my "summer vacation" days -- all the teachers get three, including me even though I've only been here for one week of the five-week break period. So I cleaned my apartment all morning, then walked down to the mall and bought a bicycle (aided by a Japanese-English dictionary that the clerk and I shared) and biked downtown. My bike and I are not in love yet -- you never forget how to ride a bike, but I never learned in the first place how to ride amidst a zillion pedestrians -- but I can tell already I am going to vastly prefer it as a mode of transportation.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Rain Hike
I met up with friends this morning to go hiking on Aoba-Yama, a smallish hill just outside the city centre. Naturally, it started to pour rain just as we got to Sendai Station to take the bus. It turns out that woods will offer a certain amount of protection from the rain, but not as much as you might wish, and that hiking with umbrellas looks as silly as it sounds.
Despite the rain, it felt really good to get outside the city (even just by a few miles) and see some of the nature and the trees for which Sendai is famed. The trail wound around the hill once and up and down to varying degrees a few times, necessitating the use of wooden steps installed by the city. Between that and wandering down side trails several times, we also saw a waterfall and some truly lovely streams. The rain also served to keep away the mosquitoes and bring out an astonishing range of frogs in many colours. Sadly, it did not scare away the spiders, who were out in full force and are huge in this part of the world. The largest we saw was at least an inch long and one of several on a particular section of trail that Erica dubbed ''Wildlife Staircase.''
This past week has been Sendai Orientation, which covered a lot of the same topics as the orientation in Tokyo but tried to keep the information specific to Sendai. It also involved several more handbooks and many, many more sheets of paper to add to my already massive collection. I swear, I will have to plant trees for the rest of my life to make up for the environmental damage done by the publication of handbooks now sitting on my bookshelf.
Orientation also introduced us to the Sendai International Centre, where I am now and of which I am a huge fan. They have free internet access, a library of English books and magazines and a lounge in which to read them, a bulletin board of language partners and stuff for sale, and a English-speaking staff who can answer just about any question you have about Sendai. I need to learn how to get here on a bicycle. I'll bet they can tell me.
We also learned about earthquakes, as in how to prepare your apartment so that you don't die when a bookcase falls on you and as in the fact that Sendai is ''due'' for a ''major'' quake pretty much any time now. This was quite worrying at first, but then I realized that a.) my apartment has basically nothing in it that can fall on me, and b.) I am more likely to be shot in the street in America than I am to die in an earthquake in Japan. It's all about putting it into perspective, my friends.
Despite the rain, it felt really good to get outside the city (even just by a few miles) and see some of the nature and the trees for which Sendai is famed. The trail wound around the hill once and up and down to varying degrees a few times, necessitating the use of wooden steps installed by the city. Between that and wandering down side trails several times, we also saw a waterfall and some truly lovely streams. The rain also served to keep away the mosquitoes and bring out an astonishing range of frogs in many colours. Sadly, it did not scare away the spiders, who were out in full force and are huge in this part of the world. The largest we saw was at least an inch long and one of several on a particular section of trail that Erica dubbed ''Wildlife Staircase.''
This past week has been Sendai Orientation, which covered a lot of the same topics as the orientation in Tokyo but tried to keep the information specific to Sendai. It also involved several more handbooks and many, many more sheets of paper to add to my already massive collection. I swear, I will have to plant trees for the rest of my life to make up for the environmental damage done by the publication of handbooks now sitting on my bookshelf.
Orientation also introduced us to the Sendai International Centre, where I am now and of which I am a huge fan. They have free internet access, a library of English books and magazines and a lounge in which to read them, a bulletin board of language partners and stuff for sale, and a English-speaking staff who can answer just about any question you have about Sendai. I need to learn how to get here on a bicycle. I'll bet they can tell me.
We also learned about earthquakes, as in how to prepare your apartment so that you don't die when a bookcase falls on you and as in the fact that Sendai is ''due'' for a ''major'' quake pretty much any time now. This was quite worrying at first, but then I realized that a.) my apartment has basically nothing in it that can fall on me, and b.) I am more likely to be shot in the street in America than I am to die in an earthquake in Japan. It's all about putting it into perspective, my friends.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Home sweet home
It is hard for me to believe that I’ve been in Japan for only a week. It feels like much longer, probably because I’ve moved around so much in that time (from the hotel in Tokyo to a hotel in Sendai to my apartment) and because days seem longer when jetlag wakes you at 5 am every day.
The shinkansen (bullet train) was less frightening than I was expecting -- it doesn’t feel like you are going that fast. It felt pretty much like a standard train, really. When we got to Sendai, they put us up in a downtown hotel and took us to a nomihodai (all-you-can-drink-and-eat for two hours; one of the more genki of our number refers to it as a nomi-hoedown) to meet the new JETs who arrived last week and the veterans. It was at the rooftop beer garden that I discovered that Japan has cockroaches every bit as large and creepy in Florida. I had seriously been hoping that I had left cockroaches behind me.
In the morning, they had a welcoming ceremony with our supervisors and accountants from the schools, at which we all had to introduce ourselves in Japanese. Then we were sent off with them to get our Alien Registration cards, bank accounts, cell phones, apartments, etc. For those of us who don’t speak Japanese, we are almost completely helpless. I was very grateful for the superhuman patience of my supervisors with their brand-new 22-year-old infant.
Today I decided to try to be a little less helpless, and went wandering about the town in search of tape (to get my pictures up on the walls) and matches (to try to get my gas stove working). I found them both at a drugstore which happened to be next to a hyaku-en (100 yen, therefore $1) store. There are no words for how excited I was at this discovery. If you haven’t lived abroad, you might not be able to understand the confusion and powerlessness that comes with not being able to read anything around you, nor the sense of accomplishment when you manage the simplest of tasks, such as locating a store or speaking to a clerk in a way that doesn’t make them laugh or look at you strangely.
Not to mention the excitement of a store where almost everything was made in China and intended for North America, and so the packaging is in English. I was a kid in a candy store. Perhaps most importantly, I found a charm for my new cell phone, which is bright purple and now adorned with a beaded grape bunch. Cell phone charms don’t seem to have reached across the Pacific, but they are huge here. Everyone I see (regardless of age and gender) has at least one and usually many dangling and often ringing or chiming. I broke the rules a little -- they are supposed to be souvenirs from a trip, or at least a collection with some theme or other -- but my phone seemed so naked without one.
Besides, I think my collection is going to be of products with Japlish on them. Apparently, they think English is cool and it doesn’t matter whether or not it makes sense. My purchases so far:
nail clippers with a picture of a little church and “I want to sing with a romantic scene. It perfectly fits my private time.”
socks whose packaging reads: “Rousing: Modern woman just like you would enjoy an active life. Please enjoy this comfortable fit for your delightful urbane living.”
a coin purse: “Favric case: I will pack it with a wonderful memory.”
I am also still collecting quotes. The best from Tokyo Orientation --
Presenter A: As soon as you sniffle or cough, it’ll be like: “Oh, no, the foreigner’s sick!”
Presenter B: We’re an expensive machine that they don’t know how to work.”
Japanese minister: “I’m so nervous my body feels as tight as jeans taken from the dryer… people would rather die than speak in public.”
“You don’t need to see your mom sausaged in pink spandex working out…it’s a big turnoff for me, anyway”
“Remember symphony orchestras: if you have only conductors, the only music you get is belch, burp, and occasionally fart.”
The shinkansen (bullet train) was less frightening than I was expecting -- it doesn’t feel like you are going that fast. It felt pretty much like a standard train, really. When we got to Sendai, they put us up in a downtown hotel and took us to a nomihodai (all-you-can-drink-and-eat for two hours; one of the more genki of our number refers to it as a nomi-hoedown) to meet the new JETs who arrived last week and the veterans. It was at the rooftop beer garden that I discovered that Japan has cockroaches every bit as large and creepy in Florida. I had seriously been hoping that I had left cockroaches behind me.
In the morning, they had a welcoming ceremony with our supervisors and accountants from the schools, at which we all had to introduce ourselves in Japanese. Then we were sent off with them to get our Alien Registration cards, bank accounts, cell phones, apartments, etc. For those of us who don’t speak Japanese, we are almost completely helpless. I was very grateful for the superhuman patience of my supervisors with their brand-new 22-year-old infant.
Today I decided to try to be a little less helpless, and went wandering about the town in search of tape (to get my pictures up on the walls) and matches (to try to get my gas stove working). I found them both at a drugstore which happened to be next to a hyaku-en (100 yen, therefore $1) store. There are no words for how excited I was at this discovery. If you haven’t lived abroad, you might not be able to understand the confusion and powerlessness that comes with not being able to read anything around you, nor the sense of accomplishment when you manage the simplest of tasks, such as locating a store or speaking to a clerk in a way that doesn’t make them laugh or look at you strangely.
Not to mention the excitement of a store where almost everything was made in China and intended for North America, and so the packaging is in English. I was a kid in a candy store. Perhaps most importantly, I found a charm for my new cell phone, which is bright purple and now adorned with a beaded grape bunch. Cell phone charms don’t seem to have reached across the Pacific, but they are huge here. Everyone I see (regardless of age and gender) has at least one and usually many dangling and often ringing or chiming. I broke the rules a little -- they are supposed to be souvenirs from a trip, or at least a collection with some theme or other -- but my phone seemed so naked without one.
Besides, I think my collection is going to be of products with Japlish on them. Apparently, they think English is cool and it doesn’t matter whether or not it makes sense. My purchases so far:
nail clippers with a picture of a little church and “I want to sing with a romantic scene. It perfectly fits my private time.”
socks whose packaging reads: “Rousing: Modern woman just like you would enjoy an active life. Please enjoy this comfortable fit for your delightful urbane living.”
a coin purse: “Favric case: I will pack it with a wonderful memory.”
I am also still collecting quotes. The best from Tokyo Orientation --
Presenter A: As soon as you sniffle or cough, it’ll be like: “Oh, no, the foreigner’s sick!”
Presenter B: We’re an expensive machine that they don’t know how to work.”
Japanese minister: “I’m so nervous my body feels as tight as jeans taken from the dryer… people would rather die than speak in public.”
“You don’t need to see your mom sausaged in pink spandex working out…it’s a big turnoff for me, anyway”
“Remember symphony orchestras: if you have only conductors, the only music you get is belch, burp, and occasionally fart.”
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Trivia!
What is the busiest train station in the world?
(Hint: I'm going to be there later today.)
First person to comment with the correct answer gets the first postcard!
(Hint: I'm going to be there later today.)
First person to comment with the correct answer gets the first postcard!
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Tokyo!
Look, I have internet! Sadly, it is only for the next fourteen hours, while we remain at this extremely elegant hotel. Each room comes equipped with a LAN cable and the internet access is free as long as you're okay with your homepage becoming the Keio Plaza website and your computer suddenly learning to speak Japanese.
So, yes, I did indeed make it to the other side of the Pacific safely. I left Boston at 8 am (although we had to be at the airport at 5), and had an hour's layover in Newark before the 12-hour flight to Tokyo. We were met at Tokyo by a really large number of very cheerful people in yellow t-shirts: the Tokyo Orientation Advisers, reminding me strongly of the Yellowshirts at MtA's orientation. We were herded onto buses and taken to the five-star hotel that the Programme has rented out practically in its entirety. They have filled 404 bedrooms and all the meeting and ballrooms with 807 JETs, and the comment has been made more than once that we feel sorry for anyone else trying to enjoy their holiday.
Tokyo is -- well, from my corner it's pretty tame and nice. We haven't had time to venture into the true downtown heart, which is really fine with me. It is almost unbearably sultry outside. It isn't actually that hot, but the humidity makes it feel like you are plunging into a swimming pool every time you step outside. The lightning and thunder haven't stopped since we got here, even when it's not raining. I don't understand that phenomenon, and I suspect I don't really want to.
I haven't had to deal too much with the heat, though: the days have been spent almost exclusively inside, filled with seminars and speeches from various government officials or ex-JETs and teachers. Yesterday's focus was mainly life in Japan outside the classroom -- how to eat, travel, save money, get your phone and internet hooked up, etc. Today took a turn for the professional, attempting to prepare us to be teachers and junior members of staff in foreign schools -- a task made somewhat more difficult by the JET Programme's unofficial motto "Every situation is different." We are all still very jetlagged, which means that by the final hours of a 9-to-5 day, no one is able to pay much attention anymore.
That does not mean, however, that we don't manage to find a second wind for evening activities, which are somewhat more on the social side. Last night, most prefectures, including mine, went out to karaoke. Japanese-style karaoke is very different than what I came to expect in Sackville: instead of singing to the whole bar, you are put into a private room with just your own group. I didn't sing, but I would have been much more comfortable had I wanted to. Luckily for anyone who didn't want to sing, the ticket also included all-you-can-drink, and the constant stream of pitchers meant that no one really cared, or could keep track of, who sang and who didn't.
Tonight I had an adventure in Shinjuku (this neighborhood of Tokyo), that was entirely accidental. At 6.30, I left the hotel room on a mission for: a converter that would let me plug my computer's cord into a Japanese-style outlet; a post office to mail a postcard to my family; and a vegetarian dinner. I was armed with: a set of phrases about vegetarianism and electronics, a few memorized phrases such as "sumimasen" (excuse me) and "arigato gozaimasu" (thank you), a Japanese-English dictionary (although I have never figured out how you are supposed to gracefully whip one of those out in the middle of a store or conversation to look up something), my computer cord, a map of Shinjuku, my camera, and my passport (my only acceptable ID, which the police can ask for anytime, until I get an Alien Registration card).
So what happened then?
1.) I got very lost in Shinjuku. My map sucked, as it turned out, and the directions I'd been given were unhelpful. I wasn't ever really worried about this, because I had enough cash for a taxi to take me back to the hotel if I really couldn't find myself.
2.) I discovered that being vegetarian and unable to read Japanese is a very, very bad combination. Nothing is safe, and it is impossible to tell from pictures on packages whether something has meat sauce/ground beef pieces/fish flakes/etc in it. [As a side note, I had no idea how meat-based Japanese food it. Why didn't anyone warn me?!]
3.) I found the Shinjuku Post Office, nearly by accident. I had just spotted the name of the hotel shining in the distance, and I was about ready to give up and go back for more directions, when I noticed that the street sign was for "Shinjuku Post Office" -- and so was the one for the cross-street. So I looked around, and there it was. A little broken conversation later -- "Sumimasen, Amerika" -- and my postcard was on the way.
4.) My map said the electronics store was just down the street from the post office, so I decided to try again. It took going down the wrong street once before I found it.
5.) I discovered that being a non-electronics buff and a non-Japanese speaker in an eight-story electronics shop is not a very fun thing to do. I asked three different clerks for help, mostly by taking out the cord and banging the end against the wall, before understanding that they were trying to send me to the 8th floor. Once I got there, a cashier was able to get me what I needed, with the assistance of two broken languages and a lot more sign language and plug-banging.
6.) I gave up on trying to decipher Japanese food, and decided to try to find the Subway on my map, where at least I could point to what I wanted. I went through the wrong door of the electronics shop, which got me lost again, but I eventually found the Subway thanks to a directory outside the largest mall I've ever seen. The Subway was listed as on the first floor, so I went inside -- however, to get to it, I had to go back outside and across an outdoor courtyard-type thing.
7.) I found out that cheese does not exist in Japanese Subway shops, although wasabi-soy sauce does (no, that is not two different things -- at least not at Subway). The clerk, thankfully, spoke some English (I was getting pretty tired of sign language by this point), and was able to pretty easily get a tomato, pickle, and onion sandwich (I passed on the pimentos and olives, which were the only other vegetables available).
8.) I made my way back to the hotel and went to the convenience store downstairs (this hotel has literally everything, even though three of the "amenities floors" are undergoing renovations right now). I bought french-fry shaped potato "chips" and some yogurt and fruit juice to make up for the lack of protein and in the sandwich.
Three errands, ninety minutes of confusion. I now understand the meaning of culture shock.
Tomorrow we go to Sendai on the bullet train -- 296 miles an hour!!! This is equal parts exciting and terrifying -- time will tell which it winds up being.
Photos later -- I took some really amazing photos of some of the architecture and the really huge mall, but my camera cord is in the suitcase that got shipped to Sendai already.
So, yes, I did indeed make it to the other side of the Pacific safely. I left Boston at 8 am (although we had to be at the airport at 5), and had an hour's layover in Newark before the 12-hour flight to Tokyo. We were met at Tokyo by a really large number of very cheerful people in yellow t-shirts: the Tokyo Orientation Advisers, reminding me strongly of the Yellowshirts at MtA's orientation. We were herded onto buses and taken to the five-star hotel that the Programme has rented out practically in its entirety. They have filled 404 bedrooms and all the meeting and ballrooms with 807 JETs, and the comment has been made more than once that we feel sorry for anyone else trying to enjoy their holiday.
Tokyo is -- well, from my corner it's pretty tame and nice. We haven't had time to venture into the true downtown heart, which is really fine with me. It is almost unbearably sultry outside. It isn't actually that hot, but the humidity makes it feel like you are plunging into a swimming pool every time you step outside. The lightning and thunder haven't stopped since we got here, even when it's not raining. I don't understand that phenomenon, and I suspect I don't really want to.
I haven't had to deal too much with the heat, though: the days have been spent almost exclusively inside, filled with seminars and speeches from various government officials or ex-JETs and teachers. Yesterday's focus was mainly life in Japan outside the classroom -- how to eat, travel, save money, get your phone and internet hooked up, etc. Today took a turn for the professional, attempting to prepare us to be teachers and junior members of staff in foreign schools -- a task made somewhat more difficult by the JET Programme's unofficial motto "Every situation is different." We are all still very jetlagged, which means that by the final hours of a 9-to-5 day, no one is able to pay much attention anymore.
That does not mean, however, that we don't manage to find a second wind for evening activities, which are somewhat more on the social side. Last night, most prefectures, including mine, went out to karaoke. Japanese-style karaoke is very different than what I came to expect in Sackville: instead of singing to the whole bar, you are put into a private room with just your own group. I didn't sing, but I would have been much more comfortable had I wanted to. Luckily for anyone who didn't want to sing, the ticket also included all-you-can-drink, and the constant stream of pitchers meant that no one really cared, or could keep track of, who sang and who didn't.
Tonight I had an adventure in Shinjuku (this neighborhood of Tokyo), that was entirely accidental. At 6.30, I left the hotel room on a mission for: a converter that would let me plug my computer's cord into a Japanese-style outlet; a post office to mail a postcard to my family; and a vegetarian dinner. I was armed with: a set of phrases about vegetarianism and electronics, a few memorized phrases such as "sumimasen" (excuse me) and "arigato gozaimasu" (thank you), a Japanese-English dictionary (although I have never figured out how you are supposed to gracefully whip one of those out in the middle of a store or conversation to look up something), my computer cord, a map of Shinjuku, my camera, and my passport (my only acceptable ID, which the police can ask for anytime, until I get an Alien Registration card).
So what happened then?
1.) I got very lost in Shinjuku. My map sucked, as it turned out, and the directions I'd been given were unhelpful. I wasn't ever really worried about this, because I had enough cash for a taxi to take me back to the hotel if I really couldn't find myself.
2.) I discovered that being vegetarian and unable to read Japanese is a very, very bad combination. Nothing is safe, and it is impossible to tell from pictures on packages whether something has meat sauce/ground beef pieces/fish flakes/etc in it. [As a side note, I had no idea how meat-based Japanese food it. Why didn't anyone warn me?!]
3.) I found the Shinjuku Post Office, nearly by accident. I had just spotted the name of the hotel shining in the distance, and I was about ready to give up and go back for more directions, when I noticed that the street sign was for "Shinjuku Post Office" -- and so was the one for the cross-street. So I looked around, and there it was. A little broken conversation later -- "Sumimasen, Amerika" -- and my postcard was on the way.
4.) My map said the electronics store was just down the street from the post office, so I decided to try again. It took going down the wrong street once before I found it.
5.) I discovered that being a non-electronics buff and a non-Japanese speaker in an eight-story electronics shop is not a very fun thing to do. I asked three different clerks for help, mostly by taking out the cord and banging the end against the wall, before understanding that they were trying to send me to the 8th floor. Once I got there, a cashier was able to get me what I needed, with the assistance of two broken languages and a lot more sign language and plug-banging.
6.) I gave up on trying to decipher Japanese food, and decided to try to find the Subway on my map, where at least I could point to what I wanted. I went through the wrong door of the electronics shop, which got me lost again, but I eventually found the Subway thanks to a directory outside the largest mall I've ever seen. The Subway was listed as on the first floor, so I went inside -- however, to get to it, I had to go back outside and across an outdoor courtyard-type thing.
7.) I found out that cheese does not exist in Japanese Subway shops, although wasabi-soy sauce does (no, that is not two different things -- at least not at Subway). The clerk, thankfully, spoke some English (I was getting pretty tired of sign language by this point), and was able to pretty easily get a tomato, pickle, and onion sandwich (I passed on the pimentos and olives, which were the only other vegetables available).
8.) I made my way back to the hotel and went to the convenience store downstairs (this hotel has literally everything, even though three of the "amenities floors" are undergoing renovations right now). I bought french-fry shaped potato "chips" and some yogurt and fruit juice to make up for the lack of protein and in the sandwich.
Three errands, ninety minutes of confusion. I now understand the meaning of culture shock.
Tomorrow we go to Sendai on the bullet train -- 296 miles an hour!!! This is equal parts exciting and terrifying -- time will tell which it winds up being.
Photos later -- I took some really amazing photos of some of the architecture and the really huge mall, but my camera cord is in the suitcase that got shipped to Sendai already.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Departure
I leave for Boston in a little less than 7.5 hours, for a pre-departure orientation. I leave the country in a little less than 31.5 hours. Wish me luck and safe landings.
It takes a long time (up to six weeks) to get home internet in Japan, so there may not be many blog entries for the next little while. Fear not -- I will make sure it is fully updated as soon as possible.
It takes a long time (up to six weeks) to get home internet in Japan, so there may not be many blog entries for the next little while. Fear not -- I will make sure it is fully updated as soon as possible.
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