Scavenger Hunt

9/19/05
On Monday morning we all met at the campus and were split into groups and turned loose on the city. It was a bit intimidating at first, but I suppose it was a great way to see a bunch of stuff, get to know a few classmates, and get used to using the subway system. We had a really good time, thanks to the people in our group all being rather cool and laid back. Some groups did not gel so well, and I doubt had as much fun.

I got some really cool pictures of the city that day, and it was actually one of the last days I took my camera out with me. It was SO HOT, we were all sweating to death, especially with all 5 of us crammed into a purikura (photo booth) for the obligatory group picture. I think we did a lot more walking than we needed to, but we saw a lot more like that than we would have if we'd spent the entire day on the subway.

By the end of the day, we had hit a huge list of sites: Yasukuni Shrine, the Budokan, Tokyo Dome, Akihabara (Electric Town), the seedy open-air market at Ueno, Tokyo Central Station, the Imperial Palace gardens, Tokyo Tower, Shibuya, Spain-zaka (don't ask me what the hell that was...) and Harajuku. We didn't make it to everything on the list, but we did get to have lunch and beers at an itzakaya in an alley under the train tracks near Ueno. I have to say, that was the most fun of the day. After meeting back up with the big group back at campus at the end of the day, a few of us ended up going back to that same neighborhood to have a couple more beers. I guess the owner of the place liked us, because he sat in the far corner of what little bit of pavement in front of the counter was staked out for seating and kept sending little sampler plates of delicious stuff over to our table. None of us were quite sure of the etiquette required in that kind of situation, but the guy seemed full of smiles, so I guess we didn't screw up that bad!

I left a bit before 6 to make it home in time for dinner. I was quickly catching on that Okaasan is an excellent cook, and I didn't want to miss whatever she had in store for me. I had been nervous that I might find some stuff unpalatable, but I've been thrilled with almost everything she's put in front of me, and even eaten things I never would have dreamed of trying. For instance: little soy-pickled dried baby fishes, about 2 cm long - they taste like fish jerky. Or, even tinier little white wisps of fishes, too small to have features except black dots for eyes. These were served with breakfast. Mmmm. Tonight, I ate squid sashimi. I've also eaten some really tasty small grilled sakana (fish) cooked whole - you even eat the bones! There are only a few things I've had to pass on. One was the aloe-flavored yogurt. (Ech.) Another was the surprising way the sukiyaki was served the other night. Sukiyaki is a flame burner on the table over which a pot sits and cooks a whole mess of yummy stuff like shaved beef, mushrooms, greens, onions, etc. This part - delicious! But along side, you are given a raw egg to scramble a bit in a little bowl, and you are supposed to pick bits out of the pot and swirl them in your raw egg to cool them before chowing down. No thank you! I felt guilty, but I just couldn't do it. I've been trying hard to push the boundaries of how I can stand an egg, because they just don't care to cook them very much here, omelets or otherwise, and I've been forcing myself to eat even the runniest of egg dishes, but just plain raw, I could not do. I was relieved that Otoosan seemed to have a little joke on me, when he said something to the effect that Americans couldn't eat egg sashimi and giggled. But overall, the food has been one of my favorite parts of this whole experience so far, so I'm sure I'll have more to tell later!

Meeting the Parents

9/16/05
After another full morning of orientation, we were given a few hours to chill, and I spent them gift-wrapping the o-miyage (souvenirs) from home for my new host family. I was really looking forward to meeting them; they looked really kind in the photo I was given on Wednesday.

We were all herded into an auditorium and lined up on stage, where we had to take the microphone one at a time and introduce ourselves to the audience of all the host moms who had come to pick us up. It was a little awkward, because it felt like we were being paraded about, and not many of us knew much of what to say, except, I'm so and so, Hajimemashite! (Nice to meet you.) My new host parents speak almost no english, except for a choice word or two, and my limited Japanese vocabulary always seems to disappear at moments under pressure (ie. oral examinations and, now, meeting my new Okaasan.) We didn't have much we could say to each other, and so she just chatted away in Japanese, maybe thinking I understood her. She had a little electronic dictionary, and was looking up words nonstop.

Because the apartment is close to campus (unlike many others who have to ride the train for an hour or even more) we were supposed to walk, but my stupid carry-on was prohibitively, grotesquely, heavy. She telephoned Otoosan, who came and picked us up.

I was still feeling a lot of weight from the night before, there having been no resolution, no way to solve the fact that my life at home had just been blown to bits. The fact that it was entirely my fault made it even harder to cope with. I spent the first few hours just trying to smile and nod when ever I heard a word I recognized, but I was dying inside.

My host parents were so incredibly kind to me those first couple of days. I know I must have seemed horribly disappointed with the whole situation, because of the distress I was in, and I was so aghast that they might think I was ungrateful or unhappy with the arrangement that I made my very best effort to explain what I could of the messed up situation, by looking up words in my little pocket dictionary. I think I left them entirely confused, and thinking I was just daft, and a bit homesick. Oh well, I tried.

It turns out that I must have gotten my story across well enough, because I found out in a round about way through my classmates that all the host moms like to gossip. By Monday, half of the group new all about my sordid soap opera, thanks to the hostmom hotline. Guess that is a lesson well learned.

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... ;)