Tokyo

What an interesting city. I finally got to go out for a bit, and I think Tokyo is all the more overwhelming when you are completely exhausted.

I went out with some people who are from my prefecture, including the PAs (they are very nice, by the way) and we went to an Irish pub! Fish and chips for dinner in Japan? Yep! Quite tasty, actually. We had to ride the subway to get there, so that was an interesting experience, to say the least. It seems to be pretty logical, but the station is HUGE (2 million people go through there each day) and everything is in, you guessed it, Japanese! Luckily the PAs told us how much we needed to go the three stops, cause I am not sure I would have figured it out. They do have cards that are like a Smartrip in DC, but I will wait and see how much time I will actually be spending in Tokyo before I invest in one of those.

The place where we ate dinner, I cannot remember the name, but its that intersection that you always see in movies, where all the cars stop and then people cross the street from, like, 5 directions, and they go all over the place. Yeah, we were there, and we crossed that street. It is so lit up in that area, too, almost like daytime!

After dinner we went to this government building that lets you go to the 45th floor (for free!) and you can see all of Tokyo. A-mazing, to say the least. I would have liked to go during the day, too, because then you can see some of the mountains too, but the night view is pretty rocking too. My pictures are not the best, most have reflections of me, which actually kind of looks cool, but you have to look through it to see Tokyo.

Tomorrow I leave at 8:30 to go to Nagano. We are taking a bus and we essentially are going to drop people off in three places in the prefecture. Mine will be the last stop, so it will probably be 6-7 hours on a bus. Not too excited for that, but then I will be at my apartment in Iiyama tomorrow night, and that is pretty cool. Good news is that Krissy, the girl in Iiyama starting her second year, will be with my supervisor to meet me at the bus stop. My supervisor does not speak English, by the way. I can't remember if I have mentioned that, but there will be a 45 minute ride to Iiyama, and it would be just me and my supervisor, but now Krissy will be there too. Hopefully I will not have to go into my school tomorrow. Japan is all about first impressions, and I do not think my first impression would be so great if I had to go into school after 45 mins in a car, 7 hours on a bus, on top of the major jet lag. Fingers crossed that I can meet everyone at my school on Thursday. Then I get everything taken care of, but I may or may not have internet for a while. There is internet at the school, but sites like blogger, gmail, yahoo, facebook, pretty much the sites I need to use to get in contact with anyone, are all blocked on the school network. Perhaps I will luck out and be able to piggyback off of someone's wireless in my apartment building.

Check my shutterfly for pics! There are some not from Japan, but I posted them anyway!