Way Back Track 2: In Training

Temporal coordinates set for the last week of March, 2007 Mr. Peabody.

Well, this is the part of my story that I can’t really tell you too much about, without being contractually obligated to kill you that is. I speak, of course, of my company’s training regimen. I’ll leave the details to your imaginations and simply explain that various injuries occurred over the course of the week, mainly due to filling out so much paper work.

The best thing about my current situation is the hotel. This place is PLUSH! The Narita View is only about 20 minutes from the airport and has everything from an artificial hot spring（which, sadly, costs more money than I’m willing to spend at the moment） to 3 fairly high class restaurants. That is apparently common in Japan, for the really fancy modern restaurants to be affiliated with a major hotel. I picked up more than a few stares being a gaijin who was willing to eat sashimi. For some strange reason, Americans have a reputation of being unwilling to eat raw fish. Now why could that be, I wonder?

Anyway, I have had an interesting adventure here. I’ve made a new friend here, we’ll call him George. He’s a fellow American and he knows nothing from Japan nor a word of Japanese. He wanted to see downtown Tokyo, specifically Akihabara Electric Town. Since that requires a 2 hour round trip on the Tokyo Metro. Since the train system can be confusing for someone who can’t read and doesn’t have any experience with the system. Since I’d ridden this route on a previous vacation to Japan, I accompanied him.

20 stations and only one missed layover later, we were in the neon labyrinth known as the Tokyo nightlife. Being a fellow English major, George was amazed by the 8 story bookstores. That’s one of the things I live about this country, the respect for books. Bookstores in America are rapidly vanishing into a void of Bones & Ignoble nothing. Yet here, you can’t walk into a shopping center or train station without tripping over a bookstore. No wonder the kanji for “Japan” can be read individually as “sun” and “book.”

The most fun of the day was when we got back to Narita. Short version, British people are funny when drunk. We ran into a girl that saw us and started yelling “Damn Yankee” style comments to us. I eventually had to verbally, and loudly, that I was born in England as well. I was then proclaimed a real person and the jokes about having gone native began to fly.

The training went well, although I still had some serious questions about my company’s level of intelligence when I was told that my city was a new contract for the company and that I was the first ALT to be sent out there. It’s my first assignment and the company is sending me out there sight unseen. I’m either really good, or they are really nuts.

Either works for me.

Our next adventure in the Way Back Machine (v. 2.48) will include the actual moving in process. What’s more, if I can get my freaking camera to work with my new Japanese laptop, I’ll try and post some pictures at the same time.