The Orientation (Week 1)

The orientation took place at the beautiful campus of SOKENDAI (a.k.a. The Graduate University for Advanced Studies or something complicated like that) somewhere in the Tokyo vicinity.
This is totally out of focus, but if you look closely enough, you can see Mt. Fuji in the background! (the clouds cleared up for just a few moments and we all ran out to take pictures!)




The orientation consisted of many lectures (during one of which we were told the “true” reason the orientation was held there was due to its relative isolation, precluding students’ escape, which actually turned out to be not completely true – read on). In addition to random lectures on organic chemistry and plant biology (why? Good question; I never figured it out), there were also crash courses on Japanese language, lots of good food and a fair bit of partying in the hotel/dorm at night (we weren’t able to leave the hotel past 11 pm!)

The food was surprising good for a campus cafeteria. Sashimi (which actually is quite cheap here in general) and lots of other fancy dishes. Everything was very tasty. One exception was a “Korean-style bowl with vegetables” which among other things contained an ice-cold, practically raw egg, which in combination with the stinky seaweed was just NOT palatable. Very memorable though :)
The food will require its own posts one of these days, so stay tuned.

The inability to escape from SOKENDAI part was mostly a scare – I escaped twice and came back perfectly alive. The first time, a few JSPS students and I walked to the beach together (only ~ a 30 minute walk, which as you can see from this picture is totally worth it):



The 2nd time was during the last night of orientation (Monday, the 23rd), when we actually braved up and took the bus into the nearby town, called Zushi. Not much there (most smaller stores close by 5-6 pm), but it was so much fun to escape the confines of the hotel (yes, I felt very rebellious). We went to a small restaurant/bar (where the walls were filled with gigantic bottles of sake) and managed to order food and drinks in Japanese (well, OK, Gina actually spoke a fair bit of Japanese, so I will take no credit for the successful outing). Good times!



The Japanese classes were helpful, but also incredibly overwhelming (3-4 hours of Japanese a day). The 1st day we learned Katakana (one of the 2 phonetic alphabets; used for foreign words, such as my name :) ) and the last day we learned some Kanji (the non-phonetic characters adopted from the Chinese language). Katakana was relatively easy (hey, my name is so long that you use almost half of the characters to write it :) ); we were given some ridiculous mnemonics to help remember the characters, such as “sew buttons” for ソ (pronounced “so”), “tsu (two?) buttons” for ツ (pronounced “tsu”), and “no buttons” for ノ(pronounced “no”). But I guess the ridiculousness worked and I actually remember some of them.

Now if I could only manage to remember Japanese words which seem to go in and out of my head with the speed of light. Patience is a virtue, and is my new mantra.

Day 1

6-18-08, 6:04 AM
…and I am in Japan! Despite the fact that I left my apartment at about this time 2 days ago, this is my first real morning here (the last one presumably was spent in an airplane chair, but given that it was bright daylight the entire 11 hours of the flight, you wouldn’t know it).

Even after ~ 8 hrs of sleep, I still feel pretty disoriented (woke up at 5:30 AM, which translates into 2:30 PM CO time, so the disorientation is not entirely surprising), so this will just be a hodgepodge of random thoughts/observations:

When I finally saw land out of the airplane window (flying over the pacific the entire time, so nothing at all to see), the first thought that crossed my mind was, “Wow, it really does exist” – Japan, that is. Hard to see it now, but somehow that thought qualified as profound after 16+ hours of sitting in a chair.

1st crazy Japanese thing – right next door is the Santa Chapel Christmas hotel. Yes, for real:



Despite the lack of Santas hanging from the walls, our hotel is quite nice and even comes with a yukata (a cotton kimono) – gotta go try one on!