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Japan Day 1

Posted by Mark | Filed under Travel

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.

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