Tokyo

Okay, well, before you get excited, you know how adventurous I am? (correct answer: not) My hotel is situated in the heart of the Shinjuku region of Tokyo, one of the most vibrant cities of the world, and I have spent my nights passed out in my hotel room instead of going out to karaoke or whatever else my fellow JETs have been doing. Ergo, this post has a disclaimer: I haven't seen much of Tokyo.

Maybe at some point in the next year or two I'll come back to visit. My bet is that unless I find a group to go with, and that group has ideas already of what they want to do, probably not. I'm not much of a city girl. Urban areas don't excite me.

Anyway. You asked for pictures, and here they are! This is what I HAVE seen of Tokyo!

But first, orientation!

I promise I won't bore you too much with this. I'll make it brief, and this time it actually will be, unlike the last time I said it would be brief and then I wrote a novel on the subject of flying to Japan. (cough)

Basically, orientation is a bunch of meetings, panels, and workshops in various rooms in the hotel. Each are 50 minutes long (with exceptions on both ends of the scale) with about a 15 minute break between each one. We've gotten lots of handouts and tons of really helpful information on teaching and getting involved and all that.

Unfortunately, there's also the issue of jet lag, and the fact that we went pretty much straight from the twelve hour flight (sitting down) to two days of workshops (sitting down). We are all so done with sitting and listening, to the point that when the last presenter on the first day mentioned he really wanted to go for an hour instead of his scheduled thirty minutes, the person behind me whispered, "No, please, anything but that." That said, I'm really glad to hear it all. It's taken a lot of the mystery out of teaching as an ALT (alternate language teacher, our official job title) and given us some great ideas to use.

There's about 2600 of us here, by the way. About 1000 of us are from the US. Lots of people. Hot, sticky, and we're all in formal business attire. These last two pictures I took on the first day in our first meeting.

What is this, I hear you ask? Why, this is the hotel lobby. Yes, that is a five foot tall vase over there, in front of a display of smaller china.

Another view of the lobby. There are those gorgeous chandeliers and various other beautiful lighting all through the building.

The Keio Plaza Hotel, where we're staying and where orientation was held, is enormous. There's about 50 floors, and I'm only showing a small portion of the lobby. This place is so big, we could probably fit Tooele in here.

Well, maybe I exaggerate.

This is the hotel room. (The cleaned-up version, after we've all repacked our suitcases and everything in preparation for leaving tomorrow morning.) Maybe not very inspiring after seeing the lobby, but it's comfortable. We generally keep the curtains open to take in that amazing view. Not that we've spent much awake time here, really.

So enough about the hotel. Let's talk the surrounding area. This is where my lack of knowledge really shines.

I've left the hotel twice since arriving two days ago. Once I went out with one of my roommates to visit the 7-11 and its ATM. It's one of the only places with an ATM that services foreign debit cards. The second time was about half an hour ago, when I left alone to find dinner, and that time I brought my camera.

Here is a view of a Tokyo street. That building at the end of the street, behind the tree? That's the hotel. This is a street you can drive on.

This one is not.

From my very limited experience, it seems to be that the city is divided into larger blocks that are accessible to cars, and then smaller blocks that are only accessible on foot or bike. Stores are very small, in the bottoms of buildings, and storefronts are colorful with big signs to attract attention. There was one I passed with employees outside shouting slogans.

I didn't explore much. I literally walked a few blocks down in one direction and then made a turn and walked until I hit the road, then turned around. I was alone and I didn't want to get lost, and like I said, I'm not adventurous to begin with, nor do I have a burning desire to experience Tokyo.

Besides, there was a Subway on one of those streets, so I didn't have to go far to find food.

 

I had the teriyaki chicken sandwich, the same one I had before I left for Japan. And, dare I say it, the Japanese version was far, far better.

I took this picture of the moist towelette package (that's a thing) because of the slogan, which I see now is pretty blurry. I've still got it here, so I'll type it out. It says, "The Natural Ideal style of eating vegetable." Because, you know, you go to Subway to eat vegetables. Duh.

Okay, that's it. Tomorrow morning I'm leaving Tokyo for Nankoku, the city where I'm placed. I'm finally going! Can't wait!

International Travel

Okay! So... this probably isn't going to be much of a post. I didn't take pictures or anything on my way here, since I felt like I've already done this post once (see my blog from study abroad for more details) and it really wasn't all that much different, picture-wise. Even the friendly airport limousine looked the same on the inside. Great for me feeling like I know what I'm doing, not so much for an interesting post.

So, I'll briefly go over how things went down, and then let you get on with your day.

We flew out the morning of July 24, thereby missing the pioneer day fireworks and parade. The flight to Denver was very short, only an hour long. I ate my beef jerky there, since I knew it couldn't come with me to Japan.

Denver orientation was nice. We had rooms at the La Quinta hotel, which was a nice place. All us Salt Lakers figured out who each other were on the shuttle ride there. There was me, my roommate Lily, then the other Amanda, Jason, Luke, and Tanya. Funny story, Tanya actually flew in from Nebraska (and was therefore not provided accommodations for her stay in Denver and had to pay for her own flight and hotel... weird). She figured out who we were on the shuttle by knowing when the Salt Lake flight was coming in and seeing how much stuff we were lugging around.

The actual orientation was at the Denver public library, which is enormous. There were about fifty JETs from the Rocky Mountain area. We had two JET alumni speakers, the coordinator we've been communicating with this whole time, our travel agent, and the consul-general of Japan in Denver who all spoke to us. Afterwards, there was a catered reception (a sushi practically-buffet, which is unfortunate because I'm not a fan of fish), and then we went back to the hotel to rest up for The Big Day.

We flew first from Denver to Minneapolis. We Salt Lakers didn't get to have breakfast because breakfast on Saturday starts at 6:00 instead of 5:00 at the La Quinta (lame). Our shuttle was a little late, but we let our travel agent know when we arrived and then got in the back of the line for JETs checking in. He (the travel agent) was checking names off a list to make sure we all got there, and had been a little concerned when we didn't show up for so long. So, we got to the airport at about 6:30, and then we went to get on the plane to Minnesota. And no, we didn't have time to buy breakfast at the airport.

As soon as the Minneapolis flight landed, we walked straight to our gate for Japan, which was already boarding. We just got right into line. While in line, I quickly called my parents to let them know I was getting on my way.

And thus began... the long flight.

The long flight was about eleven and a half hours long. It was supposed to be twelve, so that was an improvement. Unlike last time, I had my own personal monitor in front of me on the plane, so I got to choose movies to watch and games to play and stuff. That alone was a huge improvement over the last time I did this. I watched the new live-action Cinderella, Avengers 2, both Thor movies back to back, and then the Princess and the Frog, and I still had an hour and a half left when that last one was over. I was feeling pretty good through Cinderella, but by the time I hit Thor, my legs were starting to cramp up and it was getting uncomfortable. I got up once, ostensibly to use the bathroom but really just because I couldn't stand to be sitting down any longer.

The whole way, whenever I was feeling homesick or there were feelgoods about parents in the movies I was watching, I would get out the little charm Dad gave me and just run my fingers over it. It says "Wherever you are, you'll always be in my heart".

So once we finally did land, we got our own JET Program line for immigration, where they looked over our paperwork and gave us our residence card. It's like a green card in the US. While we were in line, the Atlanta JETs landed. It was pretty cool to meet them. Along the lines of, "Heeeeey, JETs!" (Identifiable because we were all given a sticker to wear to identify ourselves to the program coordinators in the airport.)

We cleared immigration and got our bags. Mine were the first coming round the bend on the carousel when I got there, which was great. I didn't have to sit there and wait and hope they didn't get lost somewhere. The luggage carts in the Tokyo airport are free, so I got to load them all up and head off without worrying about coordinating three big, heavy bags. Then I cleared customs (was pretty much waved through, actually) and starting navigating the airport.

Which was really actually very easy. There were JET representatives wearing distinctive green t-shirts standing within sight of each other from the door to the bus, so it was just a matter of walking from one green t-shirt to the next. I liked that a lot. Good system.

We got to the buses, and handed off the bags we were going to send ahead to our placement areas. The buses were "friendly airport limousines". That was printed on their sides, and I loved that! Even more so, they had air conditioning!

It was an eighty minute bus ride from the airport to our hotel, the Keio Plaza Hotel in Tokyo. We were given some basic information on how orientation is going to run, some papers and schedules, and our room keys, and then given the rest of the night to relax. By now, it was 6:30 PM Japan time, so about 3:30 AM Utah time.

I got into the hotel room, and put my phone to charge, since I'd seen Mom and Dad had sent me a text and I hadn't been able to reply because my phone's battery had died while it was off on the airplane. Go figure. I took a blissful, blissful shower, tried to look over the papers even though it felt like my head was about to fall off, and then died.

I tried to stay up until at least 8:00, I really did. Unfortunately, my body was not happy with me for pushing a 24 hour day (I got no sleep on the airplane here). I laid down, had time to think "this is nice", and then passed out.

Compared to my last first night in Japan, I did pretty well at sleeping through the night. I woke up a few times, but was able to get back to sleep, until 4:00 AM rolled along. Not bad, really.

So, that's the international travel adventure. Not terribly exciting, I know, but it is what it is.

Actually, I lied. I do have one picture to show you.

This is the view from my hotel room. Really sit and let that sink in for a minute there.

Tokyo!