Tokyo Part II: Day 3

I’ve just read over a bit of the last gibberishy post that I made last day and am actually surprised that it makes as much sense as it does. This one won’t be significantly more coherent as I think jet lag is still hitting me hard. I’ve been told that generally it takes about a day for each time zone traveled across for the body to recover.

The last couple of days have been very busy as we’ve been in and out of seminars all day and last night we went out to an all-you-can-eat-and-drink bar. This type of restaurant has a name in Japanese, but I can’t recall it at the moment. I’m sure that it will come up sometime in the near future. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go at first, as I was up at about 4:30 that morning. The night was organized by our prefecture advisors as a way for all of us to meet each other and have a good time. There were a few other JETs from Fukushima and Gumma who also joined us. I was glad I went as it was an amazing night and I got to meet a lot of people who I look forward to working with.

Today, seminars continued throughout the day. A lot of people seem to disappear from these seminars as the day goes on. I thought about skipping out and taking the opportunity to explore Tokyo, but I found the sessions fairly interesting. If nothing else, they do a good job of getting us motivated to get thinking about the work we will be doing and the people that we will be working with. The city I will be working in is only about 2-3 hours away from Tokyo anyway, so I will be back eventually – and hopefully in a better frame of mind.

Tonight, we went to the Canadian embassy for some presentations on Canadian specific experiences in Japan. The building is apparently one of the nicest embassies in Tokyo. At this point, many of us are so JET lagged and a quick scan of any lecture or presentation will reveal several people’s heads bobbing up and down as people try to stay awake. They also gave us a few resources and some Molson Canadian beers. Afterwards, I grabbed a quick bowl of noodles (this time soba), and then decided to head back to the hotel and catch some sleep before heading off to hour prefecture tomorrow. We have a 5 hour bus ride to our prefecture where will have our first meeting with our respective supervisors and then I think I’ve got another hour or so drive into Iwaki where I finally get to see my new apartment for the next year.

Anyway, my brain was finished several hours ago.