In Japan

After 13+ hours in flight, I finally landed in Japan! The whole entering Japan thing was quite painless. From the plane, we were directed to Immigration where 2 employees worked the non-Japanese line. The wait was pretty short because all they did was glance at the passport, stamp a couple things, and smile as they told you to proceed through. The next step was baggage claim and customs screening. My screening process was "Is this all your luggage?". They looked at my passport and directed me to the lobby.

When I arrived at the lobby, there were people in blue shirts guiding us all the way to the buses. I didn't have time to admire the little shops in the airport because my concentration was following th blue shirts. Before hopping on, they had us tag 1 luggage to send to the prefecture, while we had to lug the rest over to be packed on the bus. The ride itself was about 2 hours. The check in process at the hotel was like the airport, fast and painless. They guided us up escalators where we entered a ball room with several tables set up.

The first set of tables had name tags of people separated by flight number. The next set of them had former JETs handing us bags of things (later I found out they would be US history books and orientation agendas). The next table had the employees of the hotel checking our room numbers which have been cleverly written behind my name tag.

At this time I had my backpack, laptop bag, 1 check in luggage, and now 10+ lbs of new stuff. Getting to the room took some big effort considering I was already battling jet lag. I entered the room to meet 2 other guys from the same group I left with, which was a relief..familiar faces.

I went downstairs to meet a group to go eat out somewhere in town. The area around our hotel was full of activity, even at 10pm at night. We ended up at some Japanese restaurant called Dondon. This reminded me of the ramen shop I went to last year where we had to pay a vending machine first before getting service. I ordered a chicken katsudon and in 60 seconds, was prepared and ready. It only cost mme $5 but it was a huge bowl of food. After a late dinner we decided to just walk around to see what's there. They were mostly japanese shops but we did locate a McDonalds and Wendys in one of the busy side streets. There were also alot of shops dedicated to games. I normally am able to recognize most of the DS games, but these stores proved me otherwise. There were anime themed DS for sale, as well as special edition playstation 2s. I really had to stop myself from spending my money. However, there is a DS game I wanted to buy that would work as my Japanese-English dictionary. I have yet to find it, but I'm sure it's in one of the many shops around town.

After wandering, I came back into the room, took a much needed shower and went to bed.