too tired for wit

I suppose some backlog is in order. I left Portland Friday morning to begin my series of 14 flight hours. I nearly missed my plane to LA, which involved some serious line jumping, security line jumping, running to the gate, etc... where i made it with about 4 minutes to spare to take off time. I made it to Tokyo though. I wrangled, and dropped, and reassembled my 150 lbs. of luggage, then let it push my limp rag-doll body through customs. A teacher named Jillian was there waiting to meet me. She had one of those signs with my name on it. All my life I wanted someone with one of those signs to be waiting for me. I don't know if it was the jet lag or the lack of glamour involved in presenting my grotesquely sweaty self (even the airports in Japan are inhumanely humid) with my grotesque amount of luggage in the most grotesquely unenthusiastic way to some poor girl they had conned into picking me up on her day off, but it was really not that exciting after all- that sign. There was lots of fun trying to find an atm that would accept my american credit card so i could withdraw some cash.

Then Jillian and I took the train to Yotsukaido. Yotsukaido is the city where American Language school's guest house is. They use the house for new teachers who need to complete training at the nearby headquarters in Chiba. I dragged all my bags through the town of Yotsukaido, as Jillian insisted that I ask her every stupid I could think of about Japan. She thought I was being shy. Really, I was wondering if all those sleeping pills I had taken on the plane had been laying dormant up at that altitude and had just then launched a surprise attack on my nervous system. I managed to hold myself together until we arrived at the guest house. The guest house is a big ol' house by Japan's standards. There are five bedrooms, a living room, and even *gasp* a dryer. One of the rooms is occupied by Junya, the head accountant for the company who sleeps at the house during the week and goes home to his faraway house on the weekends. When I got there, there were two other new teachers. Dean, a middle-aged jolly green giant kind of guy who has been teaching in japan for lots of years already. And Wade, a crazy-haired, chain-smoking, college boy from Idaho who never seems to stop talking. Like me, he has never been to Japan. Unlike me, he at least tried to study Japanese for a while.
In an effort to keep me awake past 9 pm (the time they have for some reason designated as the time that will allow me to sync up with the Japanese schedule) Dean, Wade, and I went to a teacher's party. It was in some guy named Frasier's little apartment. There were lots of other teachers there from the area and some admins from the company. There was a gallon of whiskey in a plastic bottle and sake in a carton. I met lots of people there, i think. I didn't even look at the booze. I propped myself up against a wall and stared blankly at people. Now some of you may be thinking that I am over exaggerating this jet lag thing, but I insist that there is really nothing like flying for 14 hours over the date line (flying west is especially bad) and when you finally arrive you find yourself in a place where absolutely nothing makes any sense.

The next day Wade and I wandered around Chiba and went to Ito Yokado, the gigantic department store/grocery store/food court/ megamonsterstore. We ran into Dean there. We perused the bookstore and floors of wares. Most importantly though we concluded with the food. Ito yokado, also known as 7-11, has a huge wall full of delicious already prepared foods from sushi to tempura to noodles to to dumplings to soybeans. So far this is my favorite thing about Japan. There was this park by our house that has a bizarre jungle gym in the shape of a huge pink geometric squid. As it is the rainy season in Japan, it poured for the entire rest of the day. We were stuck inside and watched movies. it was kind of a welcome respite though. It was nice to hole up with some American movies in an American house with some Americans, while the Japaneseness of the outside was still feeling a little jarring.

On Monday, Dean left in the morning. Wade and I took the train to Chiba. I had already seen most of Yotsukaido, so I wanted to see another city in Japan. Also, I was a little nervous about the next day when we would have to travel to company headquarters in Chiba, where none of us had ever been to for training. Wade, who had already finished training, showed me where the place was. Then we wandered around Chiba which is a fairly large city. There is a huge underground mall that lies underneath the train tracks and stretches for about 10 blocks. We exploded our eyeballs in a huge electronics store full of crazy asian electronics. I also finally discovered the wonder that are 100 yen stores. Tons of stuff... for only a dollar. Its nothing like an american dollar store. You can buy alcohol there, clothes, small electronics components, lots of stuff. We also walked under this huge monorail that had a river underneath it. The river was really shallow and filthy, but it had huge carp in it that must have been 3 feet long. At about noon, wade and I were overloaded and took the train back to our house. We made a run to another grocery store where Wade made an unfortunate choice with some liver on a skewer and we called it a day.

Later, two new teachers arrived. There is Hannah, who strangely enough is from outside Portland and whose Dad works in the mailroom at Reed. She's already been to japan before. our particular kinds of pretentiousness conflict. After her, was Albert, another college kid from Hawaii. Wade and I called them our kids (actually, i would never say such a thing, but Wade did) and took them to the 7-11 so they wouldn't starve and kept them up the appropriate number of hours.
backlog complete.

So today was our first real day of stuff. We took the train to Chiba, and since I had been there the day before, I was in charge of leading the two fresh-off-the-plane teachers through Yotsukaido to the train station, tell them how to buy tickets, get us all on the right train, and then lead us through Chiba to the head office. I guess i succeeded, because we ended up there. Jack the main guy was there to tell us about teaching stuff and to give us a million papers. And though none of us were expecting it, he had a surprise for us. We had to interview these Japanese women to assess their English language competency. There is this whole elaborate formula for doing so. After letting us read over a packet of information for 6.5 seconds, he decided we were ready to do it for real. We each got our own poor frightened Japanese woman. We asked them questions about themselves and how long they have studied English, ask them elaborate questions about stupid pictures, had them read stuff, then asked them more questions. After all that we critiqued their English skills which are 5 million times better than my Japanese skills will ever be, and assigned them to categories. Refreshing. Actually it was nerve-racking. We were horrible. I felt awful for these poor women. We bumbled all over the place, where really nervous, and really confusing. Then finally we broke for lunch. We ate at a curry house. It was yummy. Then we went back for more presentations about stuff and more stuff. The meetings went an extra 45 minutes, which was hell. Then we searched Chiba for cheap watches and returned to Yotsukaido unvictorious. More 7-11 ensued.