Random funny Engrish: Mmm...ethnical tuna.
I got into Tokyo Saturday morning and headed to the hotel for a debriefing meeting. It was certainly interesting to see the other side of this massive orientation and all the planning that goes into it. When coming in as a new JET, I was far to jetlagged to appreciate the logistics behind the orientation, and really just wanted to get to my new home. After some assembly line labor making bags of materials for new JETs, I grabbed dinner and then headed off on a bus with a bunch of other TOAs (Tokyo Orientation Assistants) to a hotel near Narita airport, since I was assigned to help greet and herd new arrivals at the airport for most of the next day. My hotel roommate ended up being one of the people I was to be giving the presentation with, and he’s a pretty cool guy, so that worked out well. We had been previously informed that this hotel had alcohol vending machines, so a few of us decided to grab a beer and hang out a bit. It somehow came to be that our room was where everyone gathered, with random people joining in as the night went on. We started out playing various card games, including one I hadn’t heard before, called Kemps. Essentially, you have a partner, and you establish a secret sign/gesture/posture. Then everyone draws 4 cards, and through swapping with the deck and cards face up on the table, you try to get four of a kind. Once you achieve this, you do the secret signal, and if your partner notices and shouts “Kemps!” you get a point. If you are doing the secret signal and someone from the other team recognizes it as a signal, they can shout “block kemps!” and then they get a point. You can really mix it up by faking a signal, since false blocking comes with a point penalty. Anyway, it was a fun game, one I’ll be trying to spread to others no doubt. Then at some point we shifted to Egyptian Rat Slap? (it goes by a ton of other names as well). I was quite excited since I used to play it with friends back in high school sometimes. It turns out my skills haven’t deteriorated, as I won every game. After 3 or so games in a row, the group decided to handicap me by not dealing me any cards, so I had to “slap in” to get cards, and I still managed to win. I think that is what I’m going to do when I’m old and need to keep my brain and reflexes sharp, just obliterate everyone else at the nursing home at this card game. And of course I might as well put a friendly wager on the board to makes things interesting. “Oh, what now, Eunice?! Looks like I get your pudding for a week!” The only problem will lie in my hip breaking when I try to do a celebratory dance. Aaanywho, enough gloating, back to the hotel room. Cards wound down and we just began talking. And it was refreshing since we were actually having intelligent conversation about different global issues. One guy in particular seemed to pride himself on using plenty of vernacular during said semi-academic discussion, which led to gems such as “political economies be mad trippin’, yo” To be fair, I’m not sure if he threw in the “yo”, but I think it adds a little something extra. Also, randomly at some point in the night, we figured out that close to half the room could speak at least some degree of Mandarin, so I got to dust off my horribly rusty Mandarin and have a really basic conversation, which is always fun, if not a little depressing since I know I’ll never be able to put in the time to properly learn that language. Alack, alas.
Corey (roommate) and I were thankfully not on the early shift, so we still got a reasonable amount of sleep. In fact, the two of us were also assigned to the same station at the airport, the escalators! We had one other guy with us at that post, and our job was to direct folks onto the elevator, explain how to ride the elevator with their carts (which have awesome magic breaks so you don’t even have to hold it going up the escalator, something we had to reassure many a skeptical person on). We also had a sweet sandwich board sign explaining the carts that we took turns wearing and jumping around like idiots in. For just standing around all day, time went by quickly, genki (“energy/spunk”) levels never went down, and it was a lot of fun. That probably had to do with the fact that both of the other guys working the station were cool to hang out with. And to show you just how cool, here’s a picture of Corey imitating a hot dog statue.
Why the statue looks so happy to be slathering condiments on itself knowing it will soon be eaten, I’m not sure. I found out late in the game that I was actually going to be leading one of the buses of new JETs back to the hotel, so I had to leave Corey by himself (the other guy had left to lead a bus even earlier). Thankfully we had little book with what to cover on the bus ride back, because I wasn’t listening closely to the explanation the day before since I was initially marked as having no bus to lead. So I winged the whole thing, and managed to collect all the necessary forms, allay any fears, and make sure everyone knew what was happening over the next couple days. I also triple checked their forms, seeing as due to jetlag/incompetence, many people neglected to sign their form or mark a box despite me explicitly telling them to do so on the bus. Oh well, I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. I was on one of the last buses back, but managed to latch onto a group of other TOAs going out for a late dinner. Unlike the group I hung with at the hotel, I didn’t nearly as much care for this group. Being late, only a few places were open, and we settled on this place where we had a whopping 15min before last order. So there is a rat race to get our orders in on time. I don’t care to be rushed and was taking my time in looking at the menu, which apparently one of the other guys took to mean I can’t understand the menu, and started explaining what stuff was to me. It might fair assumption on his part, but it was still horribly insulting, especially considering the condescending manner in which he said it, as if he was babysitting me. Not to mention he just looked like a tool, but hey, I’m not bitter about it or anything. The next day we had a prefectural meeting and I got to meet all new incoming JETs. Everyone seemed pretty chill and nobody was freaking out, so that was a plus. Most of them had actually been to Japan before, so that made my job relatively easy.
Then I got together with my presentation partners, Corey and Cat, and we went through and timed it a couple of times, and just then just chatted for awhile. Later in the afternoon we gave our presentation, and despite being the last time slot, when the greatest number of people skip or sleep through the presentation, we not only had a solid number of attendees, but they were engaged and asking questions, it was awesome! One person even came up to me at the end of the presentation to just thanks us for giving it. That really surprised me, but I was glad to see people got something out of it.
After that was the welcome banquet, which is actually a really nice spread. Sadly, the lines were ridiculous for the first half, and I had to interpret for some government branch head the second half so I didn't get to eat a ton. And when I say interpret for the gov't dude, I basically mean I talked to him. Most new JETs don't have the balls/interest to come up and talk to one of the bigwigs, so I sat and chatted with him a bunch.
Then at some point I ran into Erica in the hotel!
After the social experiment gone bad that was the previous night, I didn’t really feel like going out on the town and plopped down to watch some TV, at which point I found some science show with an some old dude explaining atomic energy distributions, so I geeked out a bit watching that, and realized that I have pretty much forgotten any and all science vocab in Japanese. Yikes. I finished out the night with some Zelda on my DS.
The next day I helped run small group workshops for the new CIRs. We did some impromptu speeches, and then had a workshop where we divided them up based on what type of workplace they were assigned to. Like last year, I didn’t really have a home in this workshop since I’m pretty sure I am the ONLY CIR to be working at a university. So I wasn’t too much help other than piping in once or twice with some advice on interpreting for extended periods of time. That night I met up with Corey and Cat and a few others. This night turned out much better than the last, again, due to solid company this time around. We stumbled upon this omlette rice place that was underground. It didn’t have much of a store front on the street, so we were really surprised to get downstairs and find the place decorated like an old American country home. All the waitresses had on red and white checked aprons, it was like something out of the twilight zone. I was really psyched though, when my meal came with a dinner roll, scored, with butter melting inside. Mmmm…I hadn’t had a dinner roll in forever. Sounds simple, but it was soooo good. We were then going to meet up with some of the people from Corey’s prefecture at Hub, a chain bar. However, this chain apparently has 5 locations in the Shinjuku area, so after searching a bit, we end up at the wrong one. After getting a map to the other locations and consulting with Corey’s friend, I figured out which one they were at.
So we wander over to the correct Hub and meet up with everyone. It also turns out that today is 30% off drinks for Hub card members, and one of the guys in the group had made a card to take advantage of the deal, so the beers were only moderately overpriced, which was nice. I had a dark and tan at Corey's suggestion, but then for the second drink decided I prefer to have Guiness by itself rather than mixed with another beer. We had a rousing good time at the Hub until they closed up (and at a surprisingly early hour, considering this is Shinjuku we're talking).
We wandered around some more, looking for any places that were still open, and while considering our options at a major intersection, a random, college-aged Japanese dude came up and started talking to us English. We chit-chatted for a bit before inviting him to come along with us to our next, as of yet unknown destination. After some searching, we found a place open late, and headed up for a drink and some light snacks. Kazu, our random new friend, was indeed in college, but I think he said he dropped out, and he has aspirations of becoming a professional baseball player. Yeah, you and every other Japanese guy, buddy. I didn't want to burst his bubble, but I'm pretty sure Japanese society will do that quickly enough. Anywho, being an student/ex-student, we paid for his drinks, and decided to eventually end the night at some point between 2-3am.
The next morning simply consisted of meeting my fellow Gifu people in the hotel lobby and catching the train back to Gifu. We grabbed lunch in Shinagawa before getting on the bullet train and were having a rousing conversation on the way back. Now, we we're being a little loud, and one of the new girls had a particularly loud voice that must have carried pretty far, because some guy up to her and start explain how she was talking to loud, and launched into a condescending explanation of how the curve of the train makes her voice carry more, etc. Okay, fine, not the most polite way to go about it, but whatever. Then, though, she told her she should buy something to eat or drink, so she could keep her mouth busy (and thus not talk), and as he walked back to his seat sarcastically offered to buy her something to drink. Wow, what an ass. If I hadn't technically been representing Gifu, I would have probably told him off for being such a jackass about it, and now looking back, wish I had anyway. Oh well. I felt bad for the new girl, who was obviously taken aback by the whole thing. Thankfully, people in Gifu-ken are nicer than that guy.
I got off the bullet train at Nagoya, while the rest of them continued on to prefectural orientation. I contemplated hanging around Nagoya and maybe grabbing some ramen, but I had my suit and luggage with me, and really just wanted to head home. That day also happened to be Jon's last day in Japan, so when I got back to Ogaki, I went out to dinner with him and Rachel. We went to that same yakitori place we went to for Maria's last dinner, since Jon is quite the fan of that place, as am I. It was good fun, but it also obviously sucked to see Jon go. Rachel and I vowed to hang out more and Rachel, as our RPA, also resolved to create more events for JETs in our area. I picked up a few things from Jon’s apartment that he was going to toss (including a microwave, woo!), and then I headed back to my place. Ogaki was now pretty much empty, but I tried not to dwell on that too much. It’s a new JET year, with new people!
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