The Office and Orientation

Well, It's time for me to start blogging because I have been in Japan for some time now, and many people have not heard from me. Bear with me, as I only have internet access from my office computer, and it is a Japanese keyboard. The difficult thing being that the only way for me to function is to switch it to "western keyboard" setting. Seems easy enough, except that then I basically have to do everything by memory since the western keyboard setting has no pictures at all. Good thing I can at least remember where _ and @ is on a western keyboard, otherwise I would not even be able to check my mail! My Japanese is very poor, but I foresee it coming back pretty fast since I am surrounded by it all the time! People here are surprised by how young I am, a guy just walked by and was talking to my supervisor and he was like "wow, so young", only he said it in Japanese of course. Which brings me to another difficult aspect of my office experience. I can understand bits and pieces of Japanese, but actually speaking it is hard. They all think I speak basically no Japanese. So people talk about me a lot, and I know they are talking about me but I can't understand much of what they are saying. Maybe one day...

Tokyo orientation was very boring during the day, a lot of information I already knew was repeated over and over. And our schedules took up all day, from 9 until 8, both days. But the first night I saw Yuri, my Japanese friend I met at the U of A a year ago. It was weird to see her in Japan, after meeting her so many times in Canada. The second night I went out on the town, first for free beer from the Embassy of Canada(along with 3 extremely boring speeches about statistics of Canadians in Japan, and not to do drugs in Japan.. go figure..), and then out for all you can drink(alcohol) karaoke. From what I can tell, the "all you can drink" option is common, at karaoke as well as restaurants. Wish we had that in Canada! For those who don't know, karaoke in Japan is where your group of friends goes into a private room with couches and a TV, and you take turns(or not) singing. It ended up that pretty much all of us sang at once. I really like it! We had a blast... Drank a lot of beer, sang a lot, and it only cost ~27 dollars for around 2 hours. Japanese beer is good, very light and easy to drink. However, the Japanese like "good foam". What I mean by this is the horrible way they pour beer so that it has about an inch of foam on it. They say it enhances flavour. I certainly don't like "good foam," but I suppose I will have to get used to it! At first I kept getting mad at every one's incompetence in pouring beer, and then I finally asked about it and learned that is just how they drink beer here!

My supervisors are nice but don't speak great English, but the superintendent speaks very good English. I have been taken care of from the second I arrived. They even took me grocery shopping!

For now, this is all I will write, but I have many other things I will talk about later.

Love from Japan!