Day 1 - Yokoso!

Welcome to Japan! It hasn't quite sunk in that I'm here yet (since I've been hanging out with kids from school), but I'm sure it'll kick in soon.

And sorry this took so long - I had to find another image host cause uploading from here to the blog server in America took literally forever. Also, the pictures here are a little small, so click on then to see them full-size

Anyway, the flight was nice - not really much to say about it. There was a lot of ocean. Oh, and also, since we were flying west (and therefore backwards in time), I had a day with something like 20 hours of sunlight. Shin, on of the guys from the Reischauer Institute organizing the internships, met me outside customs and it was a smooth line on the railway to Takadanobaba Station, where our hotel was. By the way, Narita is REALLY far from Tokyo proper. I was expecting my first view of Japan to be skyscrapers, and instead it was rice fields. O_o

Anyway, we all (me, Debbie, Tim, and Kyle) arrived at the Hotel Sunroute Takadanobaba, and got our first glimpse how closely packed the people of Tokyo are. I mean, look at my room and tell me this isn't lead manifested in the form of a hotel room.



I mean, it's a nice hotel, very clean and everything, and I got my own private room... but they're sure economical when it comes to space, huh? Oh, and check out the "water closet."



I guess there's a point where you can't know longer call it a bathroom, and have to change the name to water closet....

















But dude, check out the super-sweet, flat panel TV I had.
























And here are a few more pictures from the hotel:

The entrance to the lobby

My alarm clock and lamp inside the bedframe instead of a nightstand


Yen!! (and lots of it)

The vending machine on my floor. I got the first drink to the left on the middle row - it was delicious. Like, iced barely tea or something...

This is the toliet in the lobby. It took me almost five minutes to figure out how to flush it.

And this is why - look at all the buttons! The flush button turned out to be on an adjacent piece of furniture. O_o

The entrance to the hotel restaurant, where I got a free breakfast buffet.


This was my second helping.... Tokyo is expensive, so if I'm going to get a free buffet, I'm going to eat as much as possible! On the plate is rice and scrambled eggs, in the bowl to the left is some soup-like thing that I have no idea what it was, but it tasted good, and on the bowl to the right was some dessert with banana and chocolate on the bottom and then cream and strawberry jam on top. There was also a lot of really good fresh pineapple, and pasta, and other things, but I had already devoured them before it occurred to me to take a picture.

And that was my first day! I walked around Takadanobaba a little bit after we moved in (and had spaghetti at a fast food place), and there were some really cool lighted side streets with the lanterns and everything, but I forgot to bring my camera.... There were also TONS of college kids walking around because it was a Saturday night and I guess my hotel was close to Waseda University (a very prestigious university in Tokyo... at least, I think it is. I know one of the famous modern poets graduated from there, so it's probably very good.) But we were really tired and went back to the hotel soon after.

There's a lot of pictures from my second day, so I'm going to make that a separate entry. :)