Day 1: Smile and Nod

Today was the big travel day: I had to get up (or more accurately I had to leave the house, since I never went to sleep in the first place) at 4:30 am and catch my flight to Atlanta. Nothing eventful happened except they served those delicious Delta cookies and the guy next to me kept talking about his kids so that I couldn't sleep. During my second flight (into Narita Airport), I sat by the window and two Japanese girls who were probably about my age. I would have tried to talk to them, but they literally slept 99% of the flight. We got served three meals, one of which was just a sandwich with two cucumber slices and two slices of hardboiled egg. I spilled soy sauce all over myself, which was both unfortunate and unsurprising.

So I got to Narita Airport after an extremely long and relatively sleepless flight, and I had to ask a few people (in Japanese!) where to go and what forms to fill out. I found that the general trend is this: if you speak Japanese to a Japanese person and sound like you know what you're saying, they will assume that you do.. and then proceed to speak back to you in rapid Japanese. At this point, you just smile, nod, and say "hai!"

I found the IES people, and for whatever reason they didn't have my check-in packet because they thought I was coming yesterday instead of today. What I don't get is why they wouldn't bring it today when I clearly DIDN'T show up yesterday. But it all worked out, and I met one of the girls I will be living with once we move into our apartment thing. She is Korean and from the University of Illinois, and her name is Rosa. It seems like we will get along really well despite having very different ideas and interests (for example, she only brought high heeled shoes with her to orientation week, which proved to be a terrible idea once we started walking around.)

We took the bus to our hotel for orientation, and my room is on the 10th floor overlooking a highway, a mall with a parking lot on the roof, and some tennis courts. The area we are in is really nice, and some of the full-year study abroad students took us around for a while after we got in. Not very much Japanese was spoken, but it was still very fun and I just enjoyed taking it all in. I passed a 7Eleven, an Outback Steakhouse (who knew?) and a karaoke bar that I will have to check out.

Well that's all for now. Cheers!