Madness? THIS IS JAPAN! *kick*

So here's what happened: between the time that I left my family home in Lynnwood early Tuesday morning, and when we rolled into the Akitakata City apartment, we were unable to find an internet connection, wireless or otherwise, due either to time or money restraints. So I typed stuff up in OpenOffice from time to time, and here it all is. You can tell how awake I was by how I write, I think.

(8/21 Wed 7 PM) We came to Japan today. Our flight from Sea-Tac left at 9:30, in a Horizon prop plane. The air tasted dry and ionic. We got to Vancouver, BC on time and in one piece – to my surprise, the YVR Customs people were more brusque than the TSA. And here's where the fun begins. Our JAL flight was delayed by a half hour, thanks to some late 'customers' (almost all the in-flight references called us that instead of 'passengers'). It was a 747, so the setup in Economy was 3, 4, and 3 sets of seats, with aisles in between. The space between the seats seems to have been designed with people 5 feet and under in mind. Still, each seat has its own dedicated LCD screen and remote, as well as limited on-demand movies (I'll discuss that later) and crap games. We got the middle and window seats on the left going in, which left a 90 year old tiny Japanese woman on the aisle, returning from visiting her daughter in/on Prince Edward Island. We had an interesting conversation about 'obon' – I thought it was a holiday, she thought it was a word for the trays our meals came on, and we were both right and confused for a few minutes. We got two meals, two snacks, and drinks on a regular basis, all of which was surprisingly good – the braised chicken was dry, but I've never had a better ham sandwich – and I look forward to horking them out tonight.

But...

Because the first JAL flight to Narita (the main international airport) was delayed, we missed our connecting flight to Nagoya by 10 or 15 minutes, and now we're stuck with a later flight. The staff were otherwise very accommodating and got everything taken care of for us. Originally, Rachel's company over here (ALTIA) was supposed to pick us up at Nagoya, but she got into contact with them and it's all been sorted out. Someone's going to get some overtime this week, and I wish it was me. It's 5:38 PM as I type this, which means that it's 1:38 AM in Seattle, which then means that since I've been awake since 2:30 or so... Yeah, 24-hour day. I've offset it with a few hours of sleep in the to-Japan flight, but I'm exhausted.

Kung-fu Panda is better than I thought it would be. It's a Jack Black vehicle, so there's a lot of Jack Black beating, something he excels at (see Tropic Thunder, for example – I don't think there's another actor who can replace him in that role, for what it calls for, and for that he's a little underrated). I liked that Po the Panda isn't a terribly good martial artist, but wins the final battle by mostly not fighting the bad guy directly – he has to play keep-away, which he turns out to be very good at. That, and the idea that the other anthro artists have very specific styles that are ineffective in the end – Po's style relies heavily on his bulky, durable physique rather than pure speed or strength, which throws everyone off. The animation is good and fluid.

Iron Man is still as cool as I remember it. The pounding music especially. And that scene where he slaps a dude into a second story wall? Priceless.

(8/22 Thur, 6 AM) And now I'm in the hotel in Nagoya. Happily, I didn't have to hork out the airplane food. After getting off the delayed flight, I discovered that they stamped my passport with a freakin' DEPARTURE stamp at Narita, which lead to a 10 minute delay at Customs. We ended up at the Kinyama Plaza Hotel at 9 PM last night, and fell into bed. Now that I've had time to look around the tiny business-style room...

The bathroom is the most striking – it's a self-contained tiny fiberglass room about two inches off the room floor (to make space for the floor drain?) with a high door jam. The sink faucet doubles as the bath/shower faucet (meaning that, if you try to wash your hands with hot water, you instead get OMG HOT! water), and the toilet is typically Japanese, with two separate flush amounts, heated seat, 'shower' and bidet. (The bath/shower is deep enough for me to sit, knees on chest, up to my chin in water, and the shower is detachable.)

The room has an AC the size of a card table in the ceiling – thankfully, as the temp is routinely 90 F around here during the summer – and a thermos of ice water. I've got pictures (fun fact: the gap in the toilet is just big enough to accidentally drop a hotel toothbrush down). The TV gets one free News channel and four pay-with-a-dispensed-card channels. There's a tiny fridge about the size of a computer monitor, and our beds each came with a yukata. As far as I can tell, there's no internet – we

Rachel received a phone as part of her job. The menus are less intuitive than you'd think, even in English.

(8/21 Thur 7:30 AM) We went out for breakfast at a Circle K 'Konbini' (shortened from 'convenience'). Japan takes its Convenience stores seriously, by the way: they sell video games and battery powered shavers, but most importantly, food. We got a small pile of onigiri (rice balls containing something like salmon or such, wrapped in nori, seaweed) and a couple of sandwiches; cucumber + ham + a little 'onion salad' = delicious. The onigiri were 105 yen a pop, the sandwiches were 250 yen, and Rachel's 500 ml of orange juice (paper container) came to 116 yen – breakfast cost us 1300 yen (plus more for the shaver). Not bad, I think that's about $12.

Japanese addresses are FUN. That Circle K is located at “Aichi Prefecture, Nagoya City, Central District, Masaki third-neighborhood, fifth, lot ten”.

We'll be taking a train to Hiroshima soon.

(8/21 Thur 10:40 AM) No, we'll be taking the damn subway to Nagoya first. Sigh. We left the hotel at 8:00 with a couple of other ALTs with ALTIA – one from D.C. and one from New Zealand – and made our way to the local station (Kinyama, I think). We got there at 9. What should have been a fairly easy trip was exasperated by a) heavy luggage b) rush hour subway traffic c) inexperience with the Japanese rail system and d) plain ol' miscommunication. I brought a full computer bag (old school type – you could carry around a thin client in it and have plenty of space) a full backpack (too full – wouldn't easily fit under any plane seat) and a large (<70>

Which leads to the subway traffic. Japan's subway rush hour is infamous, and I'm sure the locals have 20 different metaphors and similes for it. We actually lucked out in this respect, catching what seemed to be the tail end of it. I actually stepped on a guy's foot while trying to get my bags on board, and he was cool about it, seeing our predicament (three foreigners and ...me, all carrying bags). And eventually we found our way to the right station.

Well. It's not exactly a different station, as you can get to the Shinkansen platforms without leaving the station... but since there wasn't a map, and my companions were not terribly at ease asking for directions, I ended up asking. It's a different line, completely different – it's like getting off a plane and trying to board a boat (which you can actually do in the Nagoya airport). They all had tickets, but somehow the ALTIA people didn't know I was coming, and 14,010 yen later I was running with the rest of them to catch the train.

And the miscommunication... the guy was waiting for us at a clock in the station, in front of the Shinkansen ticket sales area, which we couldn't find. But I'm writing this on the train, so it worked out.

I bought some lunches (bento boxes) and apparently they're 1200 calories (depicted as 'kcal' – kilocalories – here) each. Sounds good. They're cheaper to buy in the station, on the platform actually, by a couple hundred yen.

(8/21 Thur 11:45 AM) Welp, just had lunch. The sauce was the sweet kind you put on pork, but they poured it on. And the best thing? These eki-ben ('station bento'), or this one at least, was actually _branded _ 'eki-ben'.

It's the little things that stick out in a foreign country (like, for example, what they call a 'quarter pounder with cheese'... I need to find out what that's called here, actually). The easiest example is probably the vending machines (jidou-hanbaiki – 'automated vending machines', however redundant that may seem), especially since they're so different. In the states, emphasis is placed more on the brand, Cokc or Pepsi or maybe bottled water, than the actual drinks themselves. In Japan, the sodas drink YOU... er, no (actually, there was a Pepsi truck version of Optimus Prime...). The style seems to be to let the drinks, or other dispensables (if you can name it, there's probably a vending machine for it somewhere), speak for themselves – if they major companies need ad space, they can get it elsewhere... and it will be at least a building tall and in neon.

But back to the train. The Shinkansen, the famous 'bullet trains' (personified by the 300-line), are at least as expensive as a plane flight, but with the advantages and drawbacks of trains. If you want the scenic route, then by all means yes, the Shinkansen is for you. If you want to get there without stopping every 20 minutes, then maybe not. There's no real reason to buy lunch on board – they're more expensive than the eki-ben generally – but it's part of the experience. Taking it, you see very quickly and easily how Japanese towns are set up. They're cramped. The houses mostly don't have yards (which, on the flip side, means less need to mow the lawn) and the apartment buildings are built up, not out, to the point that the stairwells are often exposed and have the appearance of being 'attached' to the side of the building. Not sure if that's more or less reason to know your neighbors. Japan being famously earthquake prone, there are no hill-mounted townhouses like you'd find in Seattle or San Francisco (I think? never been there). And if there's no reason to build on a hill, there's no reason to raze the trees on it, so since 10:15 we've seen lots of trees – it looks, in places like I-5 before Bellingham. I need to get ready to leave.

(8/22 Fri 4:08 AM) Yay insomnia! No, I've actually adjusted pretty well to the new hours here, and I think it's because of that night shift I worked at QFC – biggest mistake of my life at the time, but hey, my body seems to have learned something from it. I'm sitting in the new apartment right now, and it's a weird feeling. It was 'unfurnished' when we got here (meaning that the only things it came with were the kitchen and bathroom sinks) but Rachel's work set up a gas stove (two flames and a fish-frying itty-bitty oven) and a fridge (comes up to my shoulder, wide as my shoulders). We have gas and electricity and water. The WiFi is currently being stolen from a neighbor who inexplicably left their connection unguarded and named a 12-digit set of numbers. They also gave us two light fixtures, which work out to being two really bright fluorescent rings and a tiny 'night lamp' in the middle.

The town itself is small and kinda in the sticks. Akitakata 'City' is about an hour's drive from the Hiroshima Shinkansen station, during which we passed many, many rice fields on plots about the size of an average house – planted in between houses, as a matter of fact. Land is apparently cheaper out here, and farming is more profitable than in the states thanks to price controls and Japan-produced quotas, so we saw some ridiculously large houses here and there. Like, not big by Japanese standards (and they were), but American mansion-sized. Not much of a yard, though, as always.

We are on the third story, and there's a fairly large balcony two rooms wide by a my shoulder and a half length long, with bars for clothes and futon drying. The complex was built a plot away from what we would think of as a drugstore, called 'Wants' – yes, really, in English and Japanese. They have a big lit-up sign that goes out after they close – a nice change from f-ing Best Buy, where I could almost read by their sign's light at night, back in the old apartment. The apartment has 3 12 ft. by 7 ft. (or so) rooms, a dining table sort of room (10 by 10?), a kitchen (with a freakishly low doorway – my head clears it by 2 inches), a bathroom (same sort of bath as the hotel, but with its own room separate from the toilet and sink), a toilet (no seat amenities but with the common feature of having a 'sink' at the top of the tank, so that the water comes out of a faucet before going into the tank proper through the drain – again, separate from any actual sink), three assorted closets, and a gas system that talks to us. If we want more hot water for the bath (this is Japan, where the bath is a sort of tiny god) we press a button on a panel in the wall, it talks to us about it, and presto, hot(ter) water. Overall, it's bigger than our last apartment, something of a shock to me seeing as how the rent is lower. The floors are linoleum in a wood-paneled scheme, and they don't creak. At all. Happily, the electrical outlets are polarized 2-prongs, with a few 3-prongs tossed in here and there (although, in this room, the one 3-prong is just high enough off the ground that, if I plug in my laptop adapter, it'll hang just above the floor), so the adapters Rachel brought fit (and laptop power adapters are built with variable Watts and Amps in mind). The room we're using to sleep in has a screen door and a typically Japanese-intelligent AC/heater, which is nice.

I think that'll do for now. I am actually tired, and I'll get some photos up soon. So yeah, we're here, we're safe. Also, one interesting feature about the roads out here is that there aren't many street lights – I look out into the dark, and all I can really see are house lights and some blinking red construction marker lights. It's different and a little creepy.

Upcoming posts: Ritualized Japanese speech, Shopping in Japan, Cars in Japan, little annoyances, culture shock, food, etc.