Take flight
July 30th, 2006 by StephThe flight over here was relatively easy. Chris and I got to sit together, which made the flight much more bearable. Nik and Vivien drove us to the airport, and gave us our final sendoff.
The flight was only about 10 or 11 hours from LAX, and we had absolutely no problems with baggage or customs. There were a billion second and third year JETs throughout the airport pointing and waving and welcoming us to Japan, and so it was relatively easy to find our way through it all.
Here is where Chris and I temporarily parted ways, as I got on the JETbus, and he found his way to Tokyo via subway. Either way, the trip from Narita airport takes a good two hours, which was a huge surprise to me coming from San Diego, where the planes practically land on top of my house.
The scenery along the way was extremely green, but other than that I saw nothing particularly out of the ordinary. The freeway has tall blinders put up for much of the road, probably to discourage drivers from daydreaming and getting distracted while driving. I also thought it was interesting to note that it’s illegal to walk with a cigarette on the sidewalk here, not for health reasons, but for safety reasons (!). There is a little glass smoking booth open from 8-6 where people can partake, and smoking in clubs is acceptable as well.
I arrived at the Keio hotel in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo around 6:30 pm local time, or 2:30 am PST. The jet lag that night was brutal. But again, the check-in process was seamless. For this orientation, there are something like 1500 JETs beginning a new life in Japan, as well as 5500 JETs working nationwide in Japan.
Chris lucked out; He’s not allowed to say with me at the hotel, so instead he’s staying with our friend Andrew from Harvey Mudd in the nearby Roppongi district. Andrew did a stint in the Peace Corps (Samoa), then 3 years with JET (Kyoto), then became a lawyer. He’s now got a job here and is living permanently in Tokyo. He’s been taking us out nights (after which he goes back to work) and lets us sleep on his futon.
So after getting settled, I arranged for Chris and Andrew to meet me at the hotel. While I waited for them to show up, I sated my ravenous hunger by going to the convenience store on the bottom level of the hotel. I (tried) to ask the clerk in Japanese: Which of your ramen is the tastiest? He got this big smile on his face and came out from behind his desk to identify the best seller: cup o’ noodles. There is no way I am eating cup of noodles for my first meal in Japan… so I took the ni-ban oishi (“second tastiest”) option, which was a dish of noodles with a sponge-like item floating in the middle. It actually was pretty decent, though the texture threw me off a little.
Joyously, Chris and Andrew arrived about 2 hours later, and Andrew took us out on the town. He is such a good-natured guy, and his conversational Japanese is pretty good, so it was fun for us to listen to him banter with the taxi driver, the waiters.
I told Andrew that i needed to eat something tasty that didn’t include soy sauce or noodles and to just pick something. We dove into a little traditional Japanese place, where he ordered for us fish paste squares, long tubes of shrimp spring roll, and a “sour melon” appetizer. All of which was pretty delicious. The sour melon was pretty crazy…. it’s as if you took slices of cucumber, and then grafted a broccoli head onto the surface. Also pretty tasty.
Chris and I finally crashed around midnight, which is like an all nighter ending at 8 am if you’re from California. I couldn’t believe how long we had lasted and were socially functional w/o sleep. We took awhile to figure out how to assemble the futon, which looked suspiciously thin and flat, but was amazingly comfortable.