Arrival and Orientation

7/5/2006

Far too tired from travel to write. Miss Joe and home and family already—saw the twin of our new Lexus and thought Mom and Dad were driving it. My roommate, Sarah, is from Belgium and is very nice, though her English is broken and her Japanese is worse. When we understand each other, we get along great. Japanese TV is endlessly entertaining, and getting strange looks from the natives is a bit refreshing. It lets me know I haven’t just faded into a concrete and rust dream, which is how this city feels. Got dinner from the conbini section of a large shopping center, stopped in the arcade, had some calpico, and generally ate too much. The hotel I’m staying in is literally across the street from both Aoi hall (the much older building I’ll be studying in) and the Yamasa Building II, the nice new number that other programs use. Tomorrow is the litany of tests (vocab, then something or other, then the interview test, etc etc etc ad nauseum) and orientation.

I’m absolutely exhausted, and off to sleep.

-Meredith

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7/6/06 (5:22 a.m…. damn birds)

Well that helped. Until last night, I don’t think I ever knew what true fatigue is. I don’t know how Sarah had so much energy after coming in from Belgium, but she kept trekking.

Tried to use the phone card to make the promised call to Mom and Dad, but for whatever reason there was no listing of country codes on it, so I couldn’t actually dial their number. It was weird, and I know Mom’s probably having a shit fit that I didn’t call. I’ll drop them an e-mail today and their promised call on Sunday, if not sooner. In the meantime, I have to scout for international telephone booths around here—the one I stumbled across was on 284 and a bit of a hike from campus and the hotel.

And, of course, Sarah and I got lost on our adventures back. We made a few wrong turns, and despite my excellent navigation (and the noticeably subpar map they gave the incoming students… or perhaps just the slapdash nature of city planning in this neck of the woods) we took the roundabout way to Aoi Hall. I thought Yamasa II was Aoi Hall until a nice older gentleman corrected me—truth be told, I think it might have been Declan, the dean of foreign students. He seemed a little cold and borderline “unamused” by our story, but showed us the way back. Again, it’s one more reason I’m glad I have a roommate—somebody to share the embarrassment with.

Sarah’s a character. She reminded me of Jarvi when I met her, so much so that I asked her right out when we first met—only to find out that her English is a little rough, so she didn’t really understand. Her Japanese is surprisingly lacking too—she didn’t know how to order a hamburger in the MacDonald’s last night. I had to prompt her to answer “OK” when asked if she wanted fries, or to substitute fries with chicken or shrimp tenders (did you know you can do that over here?!).

Well, what else… Ah, the shopping centers. They seem to be a generalized permutation of the American mall, but with a sort of Super-K-Mart-esque grocery/clothing/electronics/etc etc ad nauseum store attached. Long story short, the places are monstrously huge grocery stores which literally melt away into a mall before you know you’ve left the first store. There really isn’t much of a storefront to speak of in those things. Everything just sort of melts into the center of the mall. In true “we must do everything different” fashion, Japanese cash registers don’t open up, but rather spit bills from a slot in the base. And the cashiers are so unbelievably friendly and polite! They count out your change twice in front of you, and their first words are always “Good evening and thank you so very much for your business!” and they bow. (This is a decided upgrade from the Jersey “Whaddaya want?” treatment.)

And so our adventure ended last night, in the room, with food and primetime Japanese TV. The Emperor was on TV yesterday afternoon, so that was on essentially every channel before we set out, but the primetime lineup made up for it. We settled on a live-action version of some anime (I use the term “version” loosely, as it was just guys in cosplay who parodied their characters) in which the members had to perform the following task:

1.) Be launched by the other characters on a rolling UFO skateboard down a ramp
2.) Navigate a turn in the hill
3.) Launch themselves off the skateboard and over a sandpit
4.) Ricochet off a trampoline in the middle of the sandpit, and
5.) Bounce up to hit a huge ball at the opposite end.

The only character to succeed in this endeavor was a crocodile-man, who did a backflip and hit it with his feet. I kid you not.

As for the city in general, Okazaki has the aura of a town past its prime. It seems to have been built in three major spurts, with little to no progress in between—there’s the very old and old-fashioned buildings and houses, most noticeably the castle (I say this speculatively, as I haven’t yet seen it); the very new, shiny, glittering malls and arcades; and the rest, left over from the economic boom of the 80s and early 90s, already covered in rust stains and barely tended-to. The entire city is covered in concrete. I never realized how much I take trees for granted as part of the landscape, but literally everything here is paved. I can’t really say I like it, but I’m sure I’ll live with the gray sooner or later. But you know, if they had at least made the sidewalks out of different material…

Sarah doesn’t plan on waking up for another hour and a half, so I may as well lay back down. (They serve breakfast here, free of charge—how sweet is that?)

Cheers,
Meredith