Hello all and I'm officially in Japan!! Arrived around 1pm LA time, and Japan is 16 hours ahead. Right now it's 9:15pm so it's about 5:15am on the same day.
The flight was okay, 12 hours of sitting on my butt was hard around the 8th hour, not to mention the bratty child who kept kicking my chair every once in a while. I met Jeff from the INTERAC company and then Laura from London and Jody from Anaheim, who will be teaching with me in Mito after our training this week.
From Narita we took an hour train to Uero, then a subway 3 stops to Asakusa where our hotel is 3 blocks away. Mind you we have to carry all our own bags who that was fun, but not nearly as bad as the time we carried our bags from the train station to our hotel in Barcelona, Spain (nothing will ever be as bad or as long)!
We've since met a few more of the teachers that are going to be training with us. I thought other people would have been better prepared for this trip but none of the girls I met speak any Japanese at all! One girl, Sue, who I just met in the lobby, will also be in Mito and speaks Japanese, but so far that's 1 out of 4...not very good odds. I'm gonna have to really push to learn quickly, especially since more and more people are saying Mito is pretty contained with very little English.
Tomorrow we start at 9am sharp (no one is allowed to be late, ever. Damn...I'm so used to blaming everyone on traffic in LA!) and I'll be here training for about a week. The other teachers all seem very nice, very talkative, outgoing, and some even a bit nerdy...? Like super anime-lovers who could be totally obssessed with the Japanese culture and the people and are so excited to be here amongst them...? just an initial assumption. I know I packed the lightest out of all the girls; Jody came in with 4 full bags of luggage and Laura has another 4 boxes to get sent out to her. She's actually bringing most of her DVD collection out here, but I don't know if I plan on spending that much time watching movies I already own.
Anyway, I'm here. I'm posting 2 pictures of my tiny hotel room. There was even a little paper crane to welcome me! I have to iron my "business attire" now and prepare for tomorrow.
It really hasn't it me yet, but I'm in Tokyo!
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