Finally I have the internet!!!

So apparentally in Japan having the internet is not high on anyone's priorities. Neither is having a computer that works with any speed. This is because they spend all their time sending emails on their phones, which you can send as much email and text messages as you want for about 30 dollars a month, but you can only talk for 25 minutes. Last night we (the americans) went and got phones with one of our "tutors" (a Japanese student who is supposed to help you with stuff). Mine is white and I like it. Luckily, it has English menus on it (which admittedly was a high priority even though everyone was saying that I should not worry and that I would learn how to use it fast anyways), but I still can't understand the menus very well.


So.


We got to Ohare very early on Monday. My big bag ended up being .2 lb over, so I moved some lotion to a different bag and it was okay. I actually ended up taking a backpack with books and stuff and checking it, which was good - I had some extra space to put stuff. I found my gate right away, it wasnot hard at all. After a while I wandered around and got a bottle of pink lemonade because I was really bored. It was something like $2.50. Which is outrageous. I still have about a tablespoon of it, I've been conserving it.


I got on the airplane and put my suitcase in the overhead bin and stuff. There was one girl next to me on the aisle and the guy in the middle was not very old, maybe my age. he was going to thailand. I watched The Devil Wears Prada again adn the disney channel station. I slept for a couple hours, which was good. The food on the airplane:
Chicken teriyaki
ramen with tofu (the guy came around with a kettle of hot water and poured it into the bowl of dried noodles)
this pseudo italian thing with ricotta cheese wrapped in lasagne noodles with tomato sauce

After I got off the airplane, there was a corridor about half a mile long with moving sidewalks that was empty except for the people who just got off my airplane. we were eventually funneled into immigration, where there was a planeful of koreans, but I only waited in line for about ten minutes. the girl just took my papers and stamped my passport and put this piece of paper in it. Then I got to the baggage place, where my stuff was already off the carousel. It hadbeen about twenty minutes since we got off the airplane. There was another lady there too, she was japanese but was american and she walked with me to customs (where the guy just looked at my passport and didn't even touch my luggage) and then she found me a cart for my stuff and told me how to get to the train. I had to wait in line to get money changed and they had to count my wad of canadian twenties repeatedly.

so finally I got to the train ticket place and got my ticket (it was easy, a girl asked me where I was going in english and just used the ticket machine, I didn't need to wait in line and then I went to the platform and waited for about twenty five minutes for the train to get there. It was about 40 minutes from the airport to Inage station. some old guy helped me get my suitcase off the train, he lifted it out and I rolled the big one. so I found the escalator and as I was going down, Scott was going up. I guess he had gotten kind of lost. We went out the wrong side of the station first, but figured it out pretty fast and then walked to the dorm. It wasn't very far. We were the second to last people - Dave still wasn't there (later we foundout that his flight had been delayed at Ohare because they forgot where they parked the airplane or something like that and then there was a big storm). Some people carried my stuff to my room, which is really small.

I went and took a shower and then went and called home. That was an expensive phone card, it was almost a dollar a minute.

I had a hard time falling asleep.

Wednesday:

Orientation. We filled out some forms and walked to the ward office, which is a pretty big building with munincipal functions and waited to turn in some forms to get an id card. I went out to eat with some people and we went to a ramen shop and I had a bowl of rice. I wasn't hungry enough to eat a gigantic bowl of ramen. We went to this store called Maruetsu.

Maruestu was interesting - the top floor is a 100 yen (about a dollar) store. I got a lot of things like a broom and a rug (I will explain later) and a knife which is actually really nice and I thought it was going to be more than a dollar and a miniature (10") wok and a lid and a strainer and some plastic boxes and a glass jar to store food in. I got some other stuff too but I forget what right now.

The middle floor was kind of a low end department store, they had clothes and shoes and bedding and other things. I got light pink flannel sheets that were about 9 dollars apiece and are extremely fuzzy. I got a pillow with a strawberry on it and a pillow thing with three strawberries on it. It is very huggable.

The first floor is a grocery store where I got a decent frying pan and some food.

The other americans went to IKEA on wednesday night but I was really tired so I just walked with them to the station and then went to a vegetable store and bought some carrots and bananas.

Also, I found the bike that the guy from last year had given me the key to. it was teh second one I tried. It's a shame the tires are flat, I asked some middle eastern looking dude who was riding around on a bike where to get air and he took me to a bike shop and showed me the pump and I said I could do it on my own and then I couldnt attach it to the air thingy and I asked the guy who was wokring there and he said "abunai!!!" (dangerous!!!) and walked away. so I rode back to the dorm.

I fell asleep at about 8:30 on Wednesday.

Thursday: I woke up at 4 in the morning.

We were supposed to go to a information thing at the university, and since it was so humid (weather report later) and we didn't know how to walk there yet we took the train. We got there fine, a whole one stop away and then couldnt find the building in time and ended up late. luckily, we were half the group so it didn't look quite as bad. We took a placement test and met our "tutor". Mine is really nice, her name is Chisaki. The only problem being is that she doesn't really speak english at all. But her job is teaching english grammar... which is a mystery to me how that works. We had lunch togetherin the cafeteria (we both had tempura udon which was really good) and talked a bit. She went to class and made me go with another tutor to walk around the campus. later we went to this other building and I met her again and we filled otu forms and I got my school id. it's not very high tech. I glued my picture onto a card someone had written my name on and then it got laminated. It was raining a lot by the time we were leaving and we got pretty wet. The Australian girl was with us and we went to this pseudo italian restaurant in the basement of a department store called Saty. It was actually pretty good and exceeded my expectations for Japanese pizza, in that it had both tomato and cheese on a bread like crust.

Friday: I woke up at three in the morning. I was very bored and it was pouring out.

I ate and stuff and went to see if Kim wanted to go to Maruetsu and get galoushes that we had seen Wednesday, but they were not open yet (it wasabout 8:30). We had asked Emily (australian)to come with but she was sitll in her pajamas. we went back rather defeated. Kim had to go to the school because she had her oral test at 10 (mine was at 2:10) and Iwasted some time and tehn was walking back to maruetsu at 9 and Emily had just gone there and found out they opened at 10. So we walked to Maruetsu and I got galoushes andshe got boots. Apparentally in Australia they call them gum shoes or something because I had a hard time explaining what they were a previous day and eventually resorted to calling them wellingtons, like in paddington the bear and then she understood.

my feet were nice and dry.

Went to library orientation, the german girls were walking from the train at the same time and I shared my umbrella with Silke who doesnt speak english or have an umbrella. I'm not sure why, since I spent a whopping 100 yen on mine. So I talk to her in english and then I try to say it in german and then I try to say it in Japanese, by which point I think she has figured out what I am trying to say or is unnerved by my horrible german.

The library was very library-y. It was kind of boring for me when she was showing us how to search for books. Since that was sort of my job and all.

I met Chisaki for lunch again, I got something that was miniscule bits of beef which I hope was cooked but was cold on rice with soy sauce and seaweed. It was very yummy. Her friend came and ate with us.

I took my oral test, it was not too bad, the lady just asked me some questions and stuff.

We went with Kim's tutor whose name is mizuo to get phones. Mine is AU, which is teh cheapest one, and my phone cost a whole 1995 yen (less than twenty dollars). it's white and has a lot of functions I don't know how to use. But I have sent a lot of messages with it already. The only bad thing is that it doesnt have t9word, the function on american phones where you just hit the key with the letter and it guesses the word instead of having to hit the 7 four times to get an s. I think I am going to get carpal tunnel syndrome in my thumb. it actually kind of hurts now...

Last night it was pouring still and we went to karaoke. I had a chinese style bun that was pizza flavored and was really good. I think I fell asleep there for a while, we got back around 1 in the morning.

Saturday (today): I didn't wake up until 8:15!!!

I woke up and it was light out. which was nice, since it was the first time I stayed asleep all night long. It was sunny and I went to the french ish bakery near the station that always smells really good and bought a bun and a coffeecake bread thing with pecans on the top. I already ate the bun, it was extremely good bread. and not just because it was the first bread I had eaten in almost a week, excluding the bagels I had brought from home. I also went to maruetsu and bought a honeydew (which was kind of expensive but it tastes really good, I have eaten almost all of it already) and a huge bun with chocolate chips and a jar of jam and another thing of orange juice (this one is more juicey, I had gotten a box somewhere but it was a "noncarbonated friut drink" and was slightly better than koolaid. It was pretty yummy, but not orange juice like I wanted. ).

I read almost half of this book about tracing human movement with mitchondrial dna. it's very interesting.

I will take a lot of pictures to post, I havent really taken any yet and I'm not sure why.

The weather.

It was disgustingly humid when I got here and it rained a little bit the first morning and then was dry but muggy for the next two days, (I bought an umbrella one morning, it was a dollar and was blue purple and black in a sort of fake burberry plaid) but on thursday, it let loose around 4:30 in the afternoon. it was about 60 degrees and rained continuously for the next 36 hours or so. In Chicago it can rain for days on end too, but its usually more of a drizzle. this was a steady downpour and it was very windy. also, the wind kept changing directions. Scott managed to look at a weather report online and apparentally that was a tropical storm remnant. Today it's nice and sunny and there aren't any clouds to speak of and its not humid and is overall a nice autumnal day. very septembery.

There are not as many people as I thought there would be. There are the six Americans, three german girls, one australian, one canadian, one hungarian, one russian and a lot of various asian people.

There is me, Scott (from uic), Dave (from uic and is taiwanese), Kim (from Maryland) Erika (who is from Maryland but also has a Japanese passport and speaks Japanese) and Gene (Maryland and Korean-american). The Germans are Anne (speaks english pretty good), Mandy (I asked Many her name and she was like Mondy and I was really confused until she was like, you know, Mandy Moore and then they all looked kind of amused by my american accent when I said Mandy.) The third girl is Silke (Zika) and she does not speak english very much at all. The Australian girl, Emily, is actually half Japanese and hasfamily about an hour from here, so she already had a phoine that they bought her. She has a very cute accent and speaks japanese pretty well. The Canadian guy is from Edmonton and is really tall. I dont think the russian girl or the hungarian guy speak english at all. There are a lot of asian people, I met some of them the first day but then they changed clothes and now I don't know who is who. I remember the chinese guy, he has glasses, and one of the indonesian girls I think I remember her name....

I am so happy the internet is working, the lady in the office said it might take three days and that the weekend wouldnt count, but it is working now and it is saturday!!! I was really worried at first. I had to enter my ip address and I couldnt find where to put it but then I did it and it still didn't work but then I realized I had entered the numbers wrong. so now it works!!! yay!!!

Later I will post some pictures.