First Impressions: Japan

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........So, big news from the States. My best friend Lisa is newly engaged and newly pregnant! Congrats to Lisa and Anthony! For those who don't know Leese, I met her when I started at USF. We were in the same grad program and worked right next door to one another. We bonded over the insanely delicious cafeteria food that USF serves and have been best buds ever since. She is already calling me "Uncle Jeremy," but I have proclaimed myself as unofficial godfather so I can go around doing my bad Brando impression. I can see Jen cringing now. So, yay Lisa and Anthony. Wish we could be there with you! But, to segue, we are in Japan.

Wait, cancel the segue for a moment. It is also our one year anniversary today! One wonderful year together and counting: wow! (We are registered at our two favorite T-stores: Tiffany's and Target fyi). We are celebrating our anniversary by going to McDonald's. We live in the boondocks without a car. There is really no other choice! But we are happy to be spending it together: that's all that really matters. On to the story.

It was exciting to fly over the islands of Japan and land a mere 2 1/2 hours after takeoff from Korea, quite a bit different from the 20+ hour ordeal it is to get from Florida to here. I had been in positive spirits but I started letting paranoia overtake me as we approached immigration. Technically, we were supposed to have our departure ticket already in hand. Although we would be getting a work visa once we got to our respective jobs, we just had a tourist visa, and American tourists can only stay 90 days. Our ticket was one way to Tokyo. I concocted elaborate fantasies about them kicking us out of the country, but we breezed through. Jen was calm the whole way.

We picked up our gazillion pieces of luggage and I went into panic mode part two. Jen's work people were supposed to be picking us up, but we hadn't heard from them in several days. Where would they meet us? Would they be holding a sign? What would we do if they forgot? We came into the central part of the airport and scanned all the folks holding up cardboard signs with people's names: ours was not there. We stood for a moment, then Jen walked up and down the concourse while I guarded our luggage. Nothing. We sweated it out for about 15 minutes when two women walked up and asked if Jen was Jen. Jen confirmed she was Jen; turns out traffic had been rough. We were on our way.

Our luggage weighed the poor woman's SUV down, but we had a nice ride out to Tscuchiura, where Jen's school is. The woman turned out to be the owner's wife, and the other woman was a coworker-to-be of Jen's. We got to the school, and I'll let Jen talk about that, then we went to the hotel.

It was quickly apparent our hotel nightmare would continue. This was the crappiest hotel in what seemed to be one of the crappier parts of the extreme North Tokyo area, and the room was $90 a night for two. The school would pay for Jen's half only, which was understandable, but what was not understandable was how the hotel could get away with those rates. The carpets were stained, the room was tiny, the bathroom was tinier with a joke of a shower (think Bill Murray's shower in Lost in Translation except shorter and with lots of mildew). The whole experience was strange. It was like the Overlook in The Shining; we were the only guests in the hotel for most of the 9 or 10 nights we stayed there.

We decided I would stay in Tokyo (wink wink) so Jen's room would be entirely subsidized, which of course meant I stayed with Jen in an unofficial capacity. We simply did not have $360 to give these folks, and we figured they should be grateful enough for Jen's lengthy stay to allow her an unoffical guest. That meant a lot of skulking for me, though. I have attained a level of paranoia lately that only Agent Mulder could appreciate. My job wasn't going to start for two weeks, so the first few days in the hotel I refused to even stay in the room while Jen worked 1 PM to 10 PM for fear of being evicted. I just walked around town and did a lot of reading in stairwells (there wasn't a chair or bench to be found!). I found a nice park finally but for some reason this little suburban park had monkeys caged up in tiny little cages, and it was just too depressing. Finally I got sick of it, and I figured since we were the only guests in the hotel, not to mention we were probably the only white guests they had ever had (not a big tourist spot right there), I supposed they probably knew we were doubling up and were OK with it.

Did I mention that even though we were usually the only guests there, they moved our room TWICE?! So we stayed in three different rooms, each time having to repack our 10 bags of luggage. It was insane! We lived on a diet of burritos and tangerines until it was time to move into our new apartment. I'll leave that story and anything I missed here to Jen.

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