As I moved to Japan, this blog reassume some of its former duties in documenting the interesting bits of life. If I see a good movie, I might write something about that here too, though.
Life since Sunday in brief:
Flight from O'Hare to Frankfurt, which is the largest, most desolate airport ever. It's got three restaurants. In the whole enormous place. I spent most of my six hours sleeping on a bench in McDonalds. It was raining, so I didn't feel like trying to get to town and back.
Flight from Frankfurt to Tokyo-Narita, with a stopover in Seoul to change crews; Lufthansa is paranoid about letting their people go to Tokyo, even though they get a pretty serious dose of radiation every time they fly. That's ok, though; Korea has nice mountains to look at as you fly over. Significantly more interesting than Canada or Siberia, at least.
I met Mr. Sato, my regional branch manager, and a couple more teachers at Narita, and we took a bus to another airport, from which we flew to Akita, which is in northwest Honshu (the main island). It's a lot like Milwaukee, except they've still got snow. From Akita, we took a bus to Morioka, Iwate Prefecture, where I am currently for training.
Morioka is a nice little city, with a good balance of chaos and organization. It's small enough that you can walk pretty much everywhere in 20 min or so, but large enough to have lots of places to eat and such.
Training is amusing; our trainer keeps the energy up and the humor rolling. It's mostly pretty useful, too, which is nice. Interac is a very practical company. In the mean time, I'm slowly learning the ins and outs of living in Japan. My Japanese is crap, which is a hindrance, but actually makes it less stressful than France, somehow. I think it'd be different if I went back there without a language pledge, though. In the mean time, I'm eating a lot of things I can't identify. They're mostly pretty good, though, so I'm not worried.
Last night, we did have an aftershock, which was not very big, but which shut off the power until this afternoon, which was particularly annoying. I really need to shave; this morning we still had no water or light. The earthquake itself was kind of interesting; just a little swaying.
Soon my permanent living situation and car will get figured out, which will be nice. This hotel room is really tiny, and I really want to unpack and clean out my luggage; my french press broke and one of my tea caddies got opened in transit, so it's a mess.
I'll put up some photos later; right now I'm off to dinner.
