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Published: April 12th 2008
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Training…..and Trains!
The events from 29th March-5th April
OK…. I arrived in Japan on March 29th, had a day to myself to meet the other gaikokujin (outside country people), chill-out and explore, and then on March 30th (a Sunday mind you) we started training. It basically consisted of group work, note-taking, presentations, many anecdotes about living and working in Japan, and went from 9am to 6pm for 6 days. By the end, we were all totally shattered, and of course, that’s when we had to give our demonstration evaluation lessons. We were graded on our attitude, helpfulness, genkiness (energy and enthusiasm) and tested on our knowledge of policy etc. I missed out on a master trainee ranking by 1 point! But still walked away with an upper superior trainee ranking (I keep wanting to say mother superior hahaha.
After this onslaught of information, a few of us usually got together and headed out to Narita town on the hotel shuttle to get some nibblies (like okonomiyaki or katsu) and some biru too. Mmm. Some of the others actually made the trek into Tokyo, but sadly I missed out. I shudder to think how shattered I would have been
had I actually gone! I’m sure I’ll make it there some day this year….I’d better!
I got to chill out in Narita on Friday afternoon, as my train was scheduled for Saturday morning… I headed upstairs and took a lovely 2 hour nap only to wake and be confronted by yet another NEW experience common to Japan. I experienced my first earthquake! I was still a bit dopey so when the hotel started swaying it took me a moment to realize what was actually happening. The buildings here are basically constructed to withstand tremors, through the use of what can be described as a giant industrial sized slinky….got that mental image? (^_^) They also tear down and rebuild a lot of buildings every 20 years because it was discovered a while back that some people were scrimping on resources and doing a not so good job… By the time I realized it was an earthquake and ambled over to the doorway, it had stopped. It was a 5.0 in Ibaraki.
On Saturday Morning I went down to the lobby and milled around from 10.30. There were 3 of us leaving and we had to meet a Mike K (who
is from Toronto originally but has been living here for about 6 or 7 years now). We set of for JR Narita station with our hand luggage (they have this handy thing here where you send off your luggage pre-departure and it gets there within a day or two of you leaving - there are quite a few advantages to living in a small country. I packed as much as I could into my suitcase- it must have weighed about 32 kilos at least!- and yet it only cost me $17!
We had to take a train to Tokyo station, and luckily had Mike K to guide us, as it’s a total zoo! We walked for about a kilometer (NOT an exaggeration!) to the shinkansen (bullet train) gate and that’s where my journey got held up. Luckily I wasn’t scheduled to catch the train with the other 2 (which was leaving in 6 minutes).
To get through the gates, you put all of the tickets you have (about 2 in my case) into the machine and then they supposedly shoot out of the other end. Mine got stuck inside, so I had to line up to get some
assistance, so I told Mike to go on ahead and see the others off. It turns out that they made a mistake at the place where they sold the tickets and part of the journey wasn’t covered by the tickets. It was soon remedied (as Mike came back and could tell me what was actually going on), I got yet ANOTHER ticket, and I got to board the bullet train. The average speed of these beasts is about 270kms, and it’s a REALLY smooth ride.
It was a 2 and a half hour journey from Tokyo-Kyoto…this time WITHOUT Mike K to guide me. He did give me some advice though. I had been telling him about my ‘ispeak’ ipod phrasebook, and all of the handy transport phrases it gives me, when he told me to forget all of that and just go up to someone while looking confused and use key words….so that’s exactly what I did. I had to get to Kusatsu station, and change there for Kibukawa so I went up to an official looking person, held up my 3 tickets, made a ‘huh’ noise with accompanying confused face, gestured towards the gates and said ‘Kusatsu? Kibukawa?’ He
waved at some other official looking person, they pointed the way, and waved me through the gate…it worked!
Incredibly, I managed to find my way onto the correct train, and headed for Kusatsu. I didn’t actually need help for this one as they had a fancy scrolling sign in both English and Japanese for ‘Baka Gaijin’ (stupid foreigners ^_^) like me! Hehehe. This however, was as far as English got me…. I had to resort to the gesticulating wildly and saying place names thing again, and someone walked me to the correct platform where I boarded the train for Kibukawa.
On my handy map, inside Lonely Planet Japan, it shows the Kusatsu line, and Kibukawa station is marked as being the first one along the line from Kusatsu station….Not so! Luckily I had the forethought to query if the first station was the correct one, so I asked a handy nearby high school student (who was reading his English homework book by the way) if I was in the right place. Naturally this is how the conversation went:
BG: (gesticulating again) ‘Sumimasen, Kibukawa?’
SLJK: (shakes head for no)
…train keeps moving and stops at another station…
BG: ‘Kibukawa?’
SLJK: (shakes head and mumbles some other station unintelligible to BG)
BG: ‘You are gakusei?’ (student)
SLJK: (nods for yes)
BG: ‘I am sensei - eigo’ (teacher-English)
SLJK: ‘High school?’ (looking excited, as he is a high school student)
BG: (shakes head for no) ‘Junior high school’.
SLJK: (points to English book) ‘Difficult’
BG: (points to Japanese phrase book) ‘Difficult’
BG & SLJK: (shared smile)
BG: (giving up on Japanese phrasebook entirely) ‘How long…..to Kibukawa? How many station?’
SLJK: (pulls handy station schedule out of wallet and gestures to the Japanese characters filling the page) ‘This is…here’ (as we had stopped at another station) ‘This…Kibukawa’ (gesturing to equally unintelligible kanji characters further down the page).
BK: ‘Three…..san…. stations?’
SLJK: ‘Hai’ (nods).
BG: ‘Thank you very much’
SLJK: ‘Your welcome’ (sheepish smile).
KEY:
BG = Baka Gaijin
SLJK = Smart Looking Japanese Kid
And so I finally made it to Kibukawa…Yay!
Fujikawa-san is my helper here, assigned by the company, and she came and picked me up from the station and took me to the hotel I was booked into. She is a very smiley woman, about a foot shorter than I am, and she lived in
Idaho when she was younger. She goes out of her way to help (more on that in a later blog) and I would be LOST without her!
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