Week One: Lotsa Trains, and Getting the Hang of Things

So, I should probably update this now that I'm here, yah? :P

I headed out ass-early a week ago now (so early, in fact, that the counters weren't even open when we got there) with the family to my connecting flight to Dallas. It was really sweet, cause we stayed together as long as we could and we were all pretty much trying not to bawl our eyes out (but towards the end, we totally were). Flight into Dallas was relatively uneventful, except for the dude next to me who couldn't decide if he wanted to talk about his kids, brag about his job, or hit on me. oO

I had enough of a layover in Dallas that I could catch some breakfast and also a very nice martini (shaddup, drinking that early is acceptable if one is flying).

And then I had a run-in with American Airlines throwing a fit about the fact that I had a small purse in addition to my roll-on carry-on and my laptop bag. ...Dude, you let me on in Milwaukee with it, I assumed that if it was a problem, you would've/should've told me way back then. Why throw such a fit, especially if all I had to do to make you idiots happy was to put it in the front pocket of my luggage, and just for boarding only? The hell?

And then came a fifteen hour flight, in which I found out that guess what, I still can't sleep on airplanes! *facedesk* But, got lots of reading done, and this is my verdict on the in-flight movies: Devil Wears Prada was a fun little watch, Prince of Persia was pretty generic and eh, couldn't even stand the first fifteen minutes of Sex and the City 2 (...seriously, please tell me this was not written by a woman) without wanting to hurl, and Letters to Juliet was pretty blandly generic.

Happily, there were two other folks that were going to IES on the flight, so we ended up as we went through immigration (smile, kiddies, and your fingerprints, too!) and picked up our bags. We ended up coming into the terminal that did NOT have the meeting point, so, of course, we needed to take a free connecting bus over to where we needed to be, where we met up with the IES folks. We had the help of some lovely ePals in order to get our bags sent onto where they needed to be, and to purchase tickets for teh bus that took us out to our hotel.

I don't remember much of the bus ride over, mainly cause I was close to passing out after being up for more or less 48 hours. I actually ended up stumbling off the bus cause I was so off balance. FAIL! But, still managed to get up to our very nice hotel room and after doing some initial unpacking and failing to figure out how to get the plugs and lights working (hint: apparently we had to put our keycards into a slot and it turned stuff on), I passed out for a few hours.

About halfway through said nap, I met my hotelmate for the next few days. She was... a very interesting girl. Name not being given to protect the innocent. We were rarely in the room at the same time, and we tolerated each other well enough when we were. She kinda irritated me by asking I stay up to let her in one night from the glass blowing class she would be going to (a perfectly reasonable request, even if I think that going to a class two hours away by train during orientation wasn't exactly the greatest idea), and ended up not getting back until almost two in the morning (when you take into account the fact that I was regularly waking up around 5 AM and was pretty much spending most of the days walking around places and absorbing lots of information, this is not exactly the kindest thing to do to someone).

Like I said, those first days were pretty much a huge information dump and included lots of walking around and getting to know where everything was. This probably would've been all well in good if it were not one of the hottest summers on record; the past week has averaged high 90s with high humidity as well. As such, much soreness and, imho, entirely too much sweating.

The real learning, though, came when we moved into our dorms on Friday. Now, I can't speak for everyone, but dorm life in Japan is VERY different than dorm life in America. First off, dorms are privately run, as land is at a premium here, and universities very rarely have the $ to be able to purchase land for dorms. Second off, when they say there's a curfew, they mean it - unless you tell your dorm manager that you're gonna be running late, if you're there past the midnight curfew, sucks to be you, you're locked out. There's a few small things you have to do, like turning your name tag when you're in and out, and wearing slippers/special slippers in certain areas, but once you get into the habit of it, it's second nature. Meals are good and hearty, and our dorm manager is a very sweet man. Also, the baths are my favorite part of this whole thing - nothing quite like washing off outside of the tub and then sliding into it up to your neck to just unwind and let all the tension slip out of you.

Also, the dorm rooms have their own air conditioners and sinks. This is the best thing to happen in the history of ever.

Besides learning where the really important stuff was (like the university and the IES center and banks and also the shopping centers which have huge food courts and also the awesome arcades, more on the latter in another post, prolly), we've also (mostly) learned the most important thing about being in Japan: how to take the train, how to take the right train, and, more importantly, how to know exactly where it is that you're going. The IES folks took us on the ride from the town where we had our orientation, Kaihin Makuhari, out to where we were living, but from there on it was pretty much on us to make sure that we knew where we were going today.

This is why I spent most of my weekend taking the trains into both the place where we went today (Shin Urayasu, which is where one of my classes is gonna be), from there to where most of my classes are gonna be (Kaihin Makuhari), and then back to my home station so that I know that I can do it on, say the morning commute (in which you WILL be packed like sardines into a train, trufax). Cause I have a commuter pass between my home station where my dorm is and my school staiton (Kaihin Makuhari), I only have to pay for fares that take me beyond that route, and in most cases, I'll be able to get reimbursed for those (as they're mostly associated with stuff for school travel, field trips for classes/IES, and/or stuff we need to do to be good with the government), which'll be nice.

Happily, I ended up wandering into Shin Urayasu right when there was a festival going on, so that gave me an excuse to come back again on Sunday and get lots of good food and also cheap booze too.

Today, besides touring, started the process of getting registered as an alien (no, not THAT kind) with the Japanese government. Was a bit of a walk from the initial station, and then that got interesting cause there were about fifteen of us that came in needing to register and they only had the man power for about half that. Luckily, I was the first one to be taken care of, and that only took twenty minutes (which included my helper handing out forms to the rest of the people), so I got to go home relatively quickly.

Well, I've got my placement test tomorrow, so sleep is probably gonna be a good idea right about now. Expect future entries on the following:

-The awesomeness of combini (convenience stores)
-The even more awesomeness of the Japanese arcade
-Why you are going to need all that change you have lying around
-No, seriously, why do you people think I'm good at Japanese, I'm really not!

See y'all later!