So I finally finished setting up my blog today… who knows how often I’ll write in this. Hopefully it’ll be quite a bit, so check back often.
Yesterday I arrived in Japan. I slept a few hours the night before my morning flight since I was busy finishing packing everything into my two permitted suitcases. The flight from Philadelphia to Chicago went well enough but that wasn’t the flight I was dreading. The flight I was dreading was the one from Chicago to Tokyo, Japan which lasted for about 13 or more hours I think.
It actually wasn’t so bad because I had hardly slept the night before and didn’t sleep for a long time so my memory of it isn’t very good now. My seat was in a middle section with five seats. I had the seat second from the right. I felt bad for the guy to my left who sat in the very middle because not only was he trapped in there with two people on both sides of him but his seat was broken so he couldn’t really move it. He tried to change seats but the flight attendants wouldn’t let him. He was going to Korea and I think he was part of some military branch for the USA. He often cursed at various things throughout the flight. The guy on my right was pretty nice. I think I caught a glimpse of his passport once which was Chinese. I’m not sure if he really spoke English or not.
After landing in Japan, I showed them my passport and so forth. The differences in Japan were evident from the beginning. When I was waiting for my baggage, there were two people with white gloves whose only job seemed to be to make sure that the suitcases coming down and going around the conveyer belt were upright. They stood there and every once in a while would turn over a suitcase that had come down and was facing down. Also, there was a line about four feet or so away from the conveyer belt that encircled it all the way around. All of the Japanese stood behind this line until they saw their luggage at which point they would step in and grab it before moving back behind the line. No having to elbow your way in to get a shot at the conveyer belt here!
I got my two large bags and went to exchange some money into yen since I would need it to pay for the bus that would take me to Tokyo City Air Terminal where I would be picked up by a Keio student.
First I had to fill out some form before actually getting in line which included asking me for my flight number, hotel name, etc. I’m not sure if this is standard around the world or not but for some reason, I always remember just being able to walk up to the counter and change money, none of this paperwork. Maybe it’s a Japanese thing.
When I finally did get up to the counter, I handed them the form and started counting out the $20 bills on the counter. This seemed to make the person working there nervous. In Japan, it seems that they don’t like to accept money handed directly to them. Instead, there was this plastic basket there that looked similar to the type of thing that fast food restaurants put wax paper on top of and then throw the burger and fries in to. As I was counting the money before putting it into the basket, the woman seemed to get nervous that I might actually hand the money to her directly and so she pushed the basket a few inches so that instead of being a little off to the side, it was now directly between us. I put the money in the basket and she picked it up and then put the equivalent yen in the basket and I took it.
I got the bus ticket I needed and rode about an hour. In the bus, I noticed a woman reading a newspaper a few rows in front of me. I saw written in the headline “Burapi” which is the written Japanese version of “Brad Pitt” and then I looked down a bit and saw a photo of him there, too. I had always heard in my Japanese classes that Japanese people love Brad Pitt for some reason so it only made sense that in my first hours in Japan, I would see his face. I’m on the other side of the planet and my culture is still here with me.
I turned my ipod on as I looked out the window of the bus. It was overcast and about 5pm so it was pretty dark. After a few minutes of listening to Manu Chao, I realized that the jabbering in Spanish over upbeat steel drums didn’t fit very well with the rainy, dark skies over the miles of concrete I saw around me.
At one point I looked out and realized that I was looking at the 14th story of a building. I looked down from the window and realized the highway we were on was hundreds of feet above the ground. Below I could see several other highways at varying levels winding and twisting beneath us. I saw huge apartment complexes that must have held thousands of people and sky scrapers that burst out of the ground like weeds. Tokyo seemed like a city that was bigger than anything I’d ever encountered before. Probably the only other comparable city that I had been to, New York City, didn’t give off this sense of hugeness and neverending concrete.
When we arrived at the bus destination, I was pleasantly surprised by Masa, a student at Keio who had been at Middlebury as part of the exchange program the year before. He was there to pick me up so we collected my bags and made our way to the subway station. The subway seems to be very extensive in its routes and the cars are cleaner than I could have ever imagined. I had ridden the T in Boston over the summer while I worked at MIT but this subway was white and clean with real seats, not the plastic hard kind they had on the T.
When we got off the subway, we walked about 10 minutes or so to get to my residence. The streets we walked through reminded me of my time in Taiwan. The street we went down seemed like an alleyway but was an actual street since cars would come from time to time down it. There were small restaurants and shops all the way up to the small street. There was no sidewalk. We were essentially walking in the narrow street there and sometimes had to stop and move out of the way as cars came.
We finally arrived at my “dorm”. It is owned by an old couple who live there as well I think. They gave me my key and showed me around as they explained the rules in a mix of English and Japanese. They showed me the room off to the left of the entrance where my personal shoe box was to place my shoes everytime I came in. They showed me the garbage room where we will have to split up our garbage into the correct bins at maddening division.
My room is quite nice. It is bigger than the rooms at Middlebury. I have my own private full bathroom which includes the deep bathtub typical of Japan. There is a kitchenette that includes a stovetop and a refrigerator. Luckily, the people who were in the “dorm” last semester left all of their things in the main lobby room where we can take them at our leisure. This morning after I had awoken, I went down and picked up quite a few things like a rice cooker, pots, pans, chopsticks, toaster oven, plates, trash can and so on. It is quite convenient.
I also have more storage space than I know what to do with. There are cabinets everywhere and I have a closet by the door as well as two small closets in my room. I was able to put away all of my stuff with plenty of room.
The “dorm” holds 35 students. All of the rooms are singles. This is an international student dorm so there are no Japanese students here, only students from around the world. I’m not sure how many Americans there are yet since most people are moving in today and I haven’t met them yet. But last night, I met some people who had moved in that day like me. They came from Singapore, Australia, Russia, Macau, Germany, Chicago from what I can remember. So the students here definitely come from all over the world, not just America.
After I had moved my suitcases into my room last night, I hadn’t eaten dinner yet so I went with my friend, Masa, to some small restaurant. It was one of those restaurants where they give you raw meat and you cook it yourself on an oven top type thing in the center of the table. He ordered for us and got some types of beef and also cow tongue. I don’t think I had ever had cow tongue. It tasted like beef. However, the image of putting an animal’s tongue on my own tongue struck me as not very attractive as I was eating it.
I said goodbye to Masa and made my way back to the dorm where I met and talked to some people in the common room just inside the main doors. I went to sleep around 1am after taking a shower and woke up around 11am, so I guess my sleeping schedule hasn’t really changed much even though the time zone difference is 12 hours.
Today, I didn’t see anyone around except for a German guy who was moving in who I opened the door for. We don’t have anything to do until Friday when we have our Japanese placement test. I guess most people haven’t gotten here yet today so I’ll probably go to the supermarket nearby. I’ll try to take photos of my dorm and room and post them up here soon. My digital camera is pretty old and falling apart so hopefully I’ll get a new one soon. For now though, I’m going to unpack a bit and head out to the supermarket.