First day in Japan (Narita)

Getting off the plane I found Alana and James who I remembered from D.C., and Luke who I didn't remember. We went as a pack through customs where they asked me if I had anything to declare and that sounded pretty funny to me. They let me through even though I was laughing at them. James is a chemist who has an interesting project involving some odd drugs but he advised me to lay off talking about drugs until we passed customs so I also have him to thank for making it into Japan successfully. We found the bus platforms okay but Alana and I figured we should get some money exchanged as the guys mentioned we may need to pay rent up front before we were able to get money from the P.I. This was experience number one trying to accomplish something through a language barrier. The old man helping out in the exchange line was very patient though and after putting names and numbers on the wrong lines a few times we managed to get some yen. The bus ride to the hotel was only about 20 min, but it was awesome staring out the window and seeing a car pass with nobody in the driver's seat. Hehe. And driving in the wrong lane is fun. And looking at road signs in Japanese is fun. There were quite a few people from D.C. on the bus and a bunch of them remembered "banana wa." My favorite Japanese word I used in all of our practice sentances in D.C. There were also the people from Germany, Canada and all over Europe mixed in that were not in D.C. so the half-hour intros went on. Who are you, where are you from, what are you studying, where are you going in Japan, what will you study in Japan....

The hotel was nice. Fascinating energy conservation system where you have to insert your room key into a slot on the wall to get any power in the room. It was great to have a shower after who knows when I had one last hehe. I sent one suitcase on to Gunma and headed to the restaurant for scary meal number one. The looks of the fish were disturbing, eyeballs and skin and all, so I skipped that in favor of the french fries but tried a bit of just about everything else including jellyfish. The jellyfish tasted like a radish so I'm thinking it might not have been a jellyfish. I was just about to put some odd hole-y looking vegetable looking thing in my mouth while asking the guy across from me what he thought is was, and he answered back that it was some sort of intestine, probably cow... and I didn't follow through on that bite. I can't do cow intestine, I just can't. I went over to talk to the German people for a while and Dane-like-the-dog finally figured out the pronounciation of my name and I discovered I was Janel-like-the-bag. I don't know about any Janel bags, but I guess that was a better fit than Janel-like-the-perfume. Fun people. I kept my eyeballs pried open until 9pm as that was the advice for escaping jetlag, and it worked pretty well and I didn't come to life until 5:30 the next morning. Breakfast was pretty good with eggs and toast, and a few of us went out exploring after breakfast as the bus to Sokendai didn't leave until 9am. That's when we found the graveyard back in the forest. So beautiful! There were a lot of gifts left by the graves, and one of the girls knew quite a bit of Japanese language and culture and explained what a lot of the different monuments and writings meant. I didn't see any monkies, but I did see a Japanese earthworm. It just looked like an earthworm. After that we were all off to Sokendai on gigantic buses and the guy I sat next to from France didn't seem too talkative so I studied Japanese on the way there. It was about a 2 hour trip, so we stopped half way at a rest stop where I successfully acquired a coke from a vending machine and spent the rest of the way trying to read the ingrediants that were listed in katakana. It's not too hard an alphabet when you have someone to explain the modifiers and what-not, and I sat next to a very patient guy who didn't seem to mind poring over coke ingrediants for an hour. Fun stuff!!!!