But right now, however, I'm just ridiculously tired.
Because from day one, I've been on the move. Not physically, you understand, but mentally. The night my Interac group arrived at the hotel, we were shepherded into a room for a brief and unexpected hotel etiquette orientation (that, in my opinion, was way too full of smiles and long explanations for being given to people who'd just gotten finished sitting on a plane for 11 hours and hadn't eaten yet), plus paperwork.
The next morning, at 8:30am, we had another orientation. Then, we went to join our individual branches and branch managers for company training. This training lasted 8 hours a day for the next four days, and it was, to say the least, intensive. Good, helpful, and necessary, but intensive. And exhausting. By the end of it, I'm pretty sure most of us were stir-crazy and a bit slap-happy. Small things that happened during the week became hilarious inside jokes that caused us all to burst out laughing at a moment's notice. Friendships were established at an exponential rate. Survival instincts kicked in. We drank unending bottles of vending-machine juice, coffee, and tea, and ate our weight in heavily-processed bento lunches.
Finally, on the morning of March 27th (that's today for me, over twelve hours ago) we left the hotel with our bags in tow and got on a bus to Narita Airport, where we loaded up on Starbucks and boarded yet another bus.
For the next two hours, there was mostly quiet contemplation of the unfairly picturesque Japanese countryside and group good-byes when various members of the Mito Branch crew departed the bus at their assigned stops.
My group, the Hitachinaka teachers, were met at Katsuta Station by three helpful Japanese women. We were split up and taken into town to register for National Health Insurance at City Hall, open a bank account at the post office, receive our keys for our apartments, and purchase any immediately necessary items for our first nights on our own.
I was able to accomplish all of this today, with only one thing left to do tomorrow: pick up my car. I'm starting to see that a car will be very necessary in Hitachinaka, as the area is very suburban. There might be several apartment and housing properties along a street before you reach a restaurant, grocery store, or even a 7-Eleven, making walking and biking too much of an effort at times.
After several hours of fighting with my internet, I finally got it to diagnose itself, fix its problems, and connect. Soon I'm going to pass out on my new futon, which, for me, isn't nearly thick enough to be comfortable. I'm going to end up being one of those people who buys a second futon to put under the first.
My apartment is far nicer than I expected it to be, and I'm going to try to keep it that way. For being the size of a matchbox, it does an excellent job of making use of every available space, and in a way that feels roomy. There are two things in it that fill me with joy: two burners for cooking, and an actual bathtub. I had neither of these things in Taiwan. And despite the compact design of my apartment, it's definitely at least double the size of the one I had in Taiwan. Moreover, it actually feels like a living space, instead of just a room.
Hitachinaka, what I got to see of it, is beautiful. It's full of traditional Japanese houses with well-kept gardens, modern apartment buildings, decently spacious roads, and enough establishments to be interesting without overwhelming. It's a definite difference from Taipei, which was so full of shops and stores that there was always something to explore. Here, I feel it's more of a place to explore yourself. I look forward to doing so.
Here ends my first blog post in Japan.
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