first post from jolly old nippon! :D

Hello, everyone! :D

I'm currently sitting in my dorm room in Tokyo!! I live in a pretty nice suburban area called Meguro-ku (Meguro Ward) about a 30-min train ride from the school building (plus about ten minutes walking...) The dorm is pretty nice, although we had a bit of a time figuring out some stuff, like how to work the heater (the remote was, go figure, in Japanese) and how to take a shower (you have to turn on the water heater manually on a panel outside the bathroom, rawr).

We have a stove and a little fridge and a toaster oven in the kitchen, so we've been creatively heating up the food we've been buying in the toaster oven. (We're not yet comfortable with cooking from scratch, so we've been buying ready-made bento-type things from convenience stores and munching on those instead. Mal made me promise to be an adventurous eater, so I'm proud to say my very first Japanese food I ate was a kabocha tempura, aka pumpkin tempura. (It was good, but veryyy pumpkin-y, so idk how often I'll be trying it.)

The toilet is in a different room from the shower and vanity, but it has a sink built into the top of it. (I'd prefer having a self-warming seat and having to walk to the other room to wash my hands, but whatever.) It's the first in what I'm sure will be a long line of cray-cray Japanese potties.

The bedroom is pretty much our center of operations - the heater's in here, so we usually keep the kitchen door closed and interweb away at our little table. Our beds are bunked and actually quite comfortable. The tv is also in here, but it gets about 10 channels (and half of them fuzzy) so we haven't really bothered with it.

Jenny and I have pretty much settled in, and we're getting along swimmingly. We had our first proper adventure the very first full day here, aka yesterday. After giving us a lecture about how Japanese people WILL leave you behind if you're running late, we made the mistake of being late to meet the group that was supposed to take us to the school for orientation in the morning. (7:45 after over 20 hours of traveling the previous day? rude.) Not one to allow myself to succumb to panic (at least as far as getting to places I need to be is involved) I grabbed a map we had been given before leaving (it was to give our cabbies directions to our dorm) and, crossing my fingers, we headed off to the station. we circled around it a bit before finding the entrance, but the paper we had also had directions to the school, so we hopped on the trains it told us to hop onto and voila! We arrived. So first morning here we got to experience the crazayness that is a train during Japanese rush hour - that is, smashed up against everyone else in the train, and deathly silent.

Orientation was relatively interesting but dragged on as orientations are wont to do. The basic things I learned from it are these: Go to Roppongi and I will be drugged and robbed and no one will care, and I am going to fail my Japanese class. As to the former, apparently the ubiquitous Japanese police force is fond of making sure foreigners are here legally, but not so fond of prosecuting foreigner-on-foreigner crime (apparently there is a lot of Russian crime syndicate activity in Roppongi?); as to the latter, this tiny hardassed Japanese lady came up to the front of the room to talk about the Japanese program, which was basically to inform us all that the language program here is harder than anything we could have possibly taken anywhere else, and that we should probably round down one or two classes at best if we wanted to not fail. "You can stay in the harder classes if you want to," she said, "but that's your choice, and when you fail, you won't be able to drop out, you'll get an F, and I will laugh at you." Like a tiny drill sergeant of the Japanese language. Terrifying. I am going to fail. (I'm taking a placement test today, but I'm not sure how well that will go. I can stay in AJII regardless of the results, but depending what the results say I may want to curl up in a corner and cry instead. :X

On a brighter note, tomorrow we're going on a tour of Shibuya, Ueno, and one other place that is either Shinjuku or Harajuku, and is probably Shinjuku. I am very excited :D And then Monday is a national holiday, so we don't start class till Tuesday, which means I don't start class till Wednesday :D Jenny and I are probably going to lay around like lumps on Monday (we've already planned it out) because we haven't really had a day to properly relax yet. Yesterday I went to bed ostensibly for a nap at 7 and slept through till this morning when my alarm went off at 9:30. :X

Things I'm still trying to get used to:
what time it is at home, for calling and skyping purposes
exactly how much a yen is worth in dollars and trying not to cry every time I spend them

Pictures will follow later, btw. I haven't taken that many yet because yesterday was so hectic that I didn't want to worry about photographing everything on top of all the stuff we were doing. :X