Arrival

Hey! This is my first post actually being in Japan!

A bunch of other Miami JETs and I stayed up all night before out flight left Saturday morning. We ran out of things to talk about so we pretty much hit every piece of webjunk imaginable until it was time to leave the hotel.

The flight to Newark sucked....bad. There was no in flight entertainment, so we had to entertain ourselves. I didn't want to fall asleep until the flight to Tokyo so it was a constant battle to stay awake until then. The flight to Tokyo had some awesome perks. Each seat had a screen with on-demand. So we had a choice of hundreds of movies (some new releases too), tv programs, and even cheap little games like asteroids. The flight went alright. I got about 5 hours of sleep and the trip was 14 hours. Those last 4 hours drag on forever. Everyone on the plane was just counting down the miles...

Once we arrived in Tokyo, we waited probably 45 mins in customs, grabbed our bags, made our way through the airport to the buses. Narita Airport has free luggage carts, which is efffing convenient. There were JETs posted every 10 feet or so to guide us to the buses. Each one greeted us with a "Hello!" or "Welcome!" It was sweet and it made arriving in Japan feel real again.

A bunch of us Miami JETs and some Boston JETs had to wait around in the lobby of the Hotel while they cleaned our rooms. We collected out JET tote bags of stuff and a packet from the American embassy. One of the hotel clerks ripped my carry-on. It wasn't too big, but still kind of annoying. We were told that we have the night off and Tokyo Orientation would begin the next morning.

Miami JETs teamed up with some Canadian JETs and we all went out for Udon and Soba. I got a really gross one. Note to Self: Bacon soup with Udon is not as good as it sounds. We then hit up a combini (convenience store), grabbed some Chuhai (powerful lemon-flavored alcohol), and returned to the hotel. I hung out with a bunch of other JETs before going to sleep around 9PM.

Before I end the post, it's funny story time:
My roommates (4 of us because of the adjoining room) and I were all sitting around unpacking when we heard the noise, "Ding, Dong." We instantly perked up, looked around completely baffled. We started pulling open drawers, looking in the closet, and pressing buttons on the stuff in the bathroom. The sound repeated about every 1 minute or so. We finally agreed it was the clock between the beds making noise so we started pushing buttons on that too. Turns out, it was the doorbell to our hotel room. We all felt very stupid and apologized to the hotel clerk for taking so long to answer the door. We seriously heard a doorbell and checked the clock, bathroom, and drawers BEFORE we opened the door. We are gaijin.

Long Post, more to follow.