Flight to Tokyo

9/13/05
The flight was seemingly never ending. I think I sat in that one seat for something like 14 hours. I only slept for about 2 of those hours. Caught a few lame movies on the mini-viewer, and watched Hitchhiker's Guide two or three times, I think.

9/14/05
When I landed in Tokyo, it was mid-afternoon, and I felt like wet cardboard. I walked with my insanely heavy carry-on (I will never to do this again without wheels on my damn carry-on) and my laptop bag, and my pillow, for what seemed like miles, but I suppose it couldn't have been more than a mile, or a mile and a half, at most. (The airport was HUGE!) Customs and immigration were a blur, but easy enough. I finally made it to the point where all the CIEE people were corralled in a little waiting area, and we all sat there bleary-eyed for close to two hours waiting until everyone arrived. I bought an electrolyte sports beverage called Pocari Sweat from a vending machine, trying to fill my gatorade craving, and was rewarded with something that tasted remarkably like the name; not much flavor, a little salty... Well, at least now I know better. By the time they put us on a bus, and told us it was more than an hour's drive to the hotel, I was barely cognizant enough to look out the window.

We got to the hotel, checked in, and were thereby informed that we were on our own for dinner. I was not especially hungry, but I wanted to eat something just to try to feel human for a little bit. Most of us ate dinner in one form or another from the 7-11 on the corner near the hotel. That's right, my first meal in Tokyo was from 7-frickin-11. A tad disappointing. But, they had an impressive range of noodle cups and bentos, so I just tried to pick something that looked like it wouldn't kill me, and make the best of it. I took a bowl of noodles with broth packet back to the hotel room, and tried to heat it in the microwave. Then I figured out that the "microwave" was actually some kind of safe with a digital lock. Yeah, I felt a little dumb. And, I had to eat cold noodle soup. I didn't care that much, I was too tired.

9/15/05
We all met in the lobby early for the brief walk to campus and our first orientation session. In retrospect, the amount of important information that we've all had to figure out on our own since then makes the stuff they armed us with seem rather meaningless.

Later, we all piled back on the bus for a nighttime tour of Tokyo and dinner at a cool place that served everything on a stick. We got to watch them prepare each different item in the center of the dining area, and dole out skewers of this and that to everyone. It was all very tasty. Before heading back to the hotel, we went to Roppongi Hills, a new tower complex full of shopping malls and clubs, a huge hotel, galleries, and a spectacular observation deck on the 52nd floor. Our tickets to the observation deck also got us into an exhibit of sprawling miniature cities, Tokyo, New York, Shanghai, etc. New York is completely dwarfed by Tokyo. I was floored. Manhattan took up one conference-size table, and Tokyo took up two rooms! I snapped two pictures before I was informed photography wasn't allowed. Our tickets did not, unfortunately, gain us access to a special exhibit of Da Vinci's Leicester Codex, on loan from Mr. Gates himself.

I took photos of the sprawling lights of Tokyo, trying to get exposure and focus fine tuned, until my batteries died. None of the shots came out that well, because I don't have a tripod, and had to opt for the shaky long exposure to get any color. Only one or two photos are clear enough to bother sharing, but I'll never forget the view of such dense neon that just went on and on and on... I couldn't help but feel a little giddy at the idea that this insanity was going to be my home for the next year.

The rest of the night, back at the hotel, was a hell of relationship disaster, homesickness, and heartache. I went to bed spent and ruined, wondering how I would ever feel well enough to face the beginning of this year, or the next day, for that matter.

But don't worry, it gets better... ;)