Japan Day 1 « CoffeeBear.net

Japan Day 1

Posted by Mark | Filed under Travel

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

My study group all made it to Japan safe & sound. We did nearly lose some people along various stages of the way here, but in the end we arrived with our lives and health in tact. I don’t know these people well enough to say whether or not their sanity is in tact after the trip or if they’re always this crazy.

As this was the first time in my memory that I’ve flown; I think I should make a note of the following:

Flying is not as bad an experience as I had been fearing it might be.
Puddle-jumper planes suck for people over 5 foot 8 inches, due to low ceilings and no headroom when going down the aisle.
International flights are too damn long and my ears are still somewhat numb from the constant roar of the engines.
Turbulance sucks! Particularly when you’re watching the wing bounce.
Landings are not evil, but only because that means you can get off the plane soon.

The airport really didn’t seem all that different then the American airports I’d been in but whern we got to the exit I could definitely tell I wasn’t in Iowa anymore. The temp was probably in the 90’s (in farenheit measurement) and the humidity was way up there too. Granted Iowa summers tend to be warm & humid, but this was a couple notches worse than anything I was used to.

Eventually we got onto the bus and that was great because I could turn the A/C vents right on myself. *grin* As we were driving out to to hotel, the first thing I noticed was how green and lush the vegitation was. Other people were talking about how the Japanese drive on the wrong side of the road but that didn’t bother me so much. As we drove along, I was really struck by how similar the highway was to those I drive on back home. Sure there were a some small details here and there that were different but for the most part everything was the same. Then we got the hotel and everybody was talking about how small the elevators were. This amused me. :P

We got to our rooms and they weren’t as small as AWelkin had made them sound when she was talking about them. Of course the first dilemna we faced was activating the A/C. After some playing with the all Japanese remote for it; we got it working but it wasn’t cooling off very much. Bryon came by and tried to help but we’d gotten it out of the mode that he was familiar with. After some more playing with the remote, I got the A/C to blast the cold air out.

We had some time after that to relax and clean up a bit, before we went to a party at the language school. I’ll just say the cold water of the shower felt damn good. The party was very nice with food made by the other students of the school and everyone was very friendly. I’m going to stop writing tis entry now as the keyboard is killing my hands. More about Day 2 later.