incoming

I have arrived in Japan.

And I have to say, the culture shock element has been... surprisingly anti-climactic, so far.

I've only been at the hotel and up the road a little bit to visit 7-Eleven. But, because Japan uses Chinese characters in its written language, a lot of signs have characters that are, while not immediately recognizable to me, familiar to my brain. The background noise of Japanese isn't strange because of all the Japanese music I've listened to and the anime I've watched. The food is, while not Taiwanese, definitely still similarly Asian, enough that even the layout of foods in bento boxes isn't a new sight.

I haven't been into any Japanese cities or towns away from the airport, so there's still plenty that could culture-shock me. But the way things are going, I think it may not. I think my brain may be okay. I may have psyched myself out for nothing, but then, I figured my brain had reversed back into full American-mode and it would take another act of extreme will to get it back to non-English-culture-mode. It seems that now that my mind has made space for processing information in Taiwan, getting that part back up and running isn't going to be as difficult as installing it all the first time.

I'm super-tired right now, and it's only 8:30pm here now. I slept like a rock last night, only waking up once at 4am and falling right back asleep. I expect to be asleep by 9:30 or 10pm, at the rate I'm going. That's fine; we were in training for about 9 hours today with only small breaks and an hour for lunch, so even though it hasn't been that taxing, the jet lag is still pulling on me and the millions of interactions I've had all day have worn me down.

I'm actually so tired now, I'm going to wash up and go to bed early. I'll savor that now, because it's not going to happen much once I've adjusted to Japanese time.

I'll write a more comprehensive and informative blog post once I'm feeling more awake. I am here in Japan, though, awake and alive and using yen in vending machines, and munching pocky in bed while surfing Facebook. So, I think I'm okay.