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.