Arrival and First Day
After a “relatively quick” ten hour flight from San Francisco, dozing off and on throughout, we arrived at Narita International Airport. After a brief encounter with the mugginess that would welcome us later and a routine customs and immigration inspection, in a jet-lagged haze I found myself separated from my plane seatmate whom I had grown quite familiar with while I wasn’t asleep on the flight. Now awkwardly balancing my two suitcases and two backpacks I made my way back into the real world. Well, kind of the real world. As soon as I stepped out into the Arrivals section of the airport my attention was caught by someone frantically motioning at me with one hand and a sign reading, “JET Program” raised high in the air with the other. This sight would greet me another 25 times every 20 or so yards until I had reached the buses taking us to our hotel in Shinjuku and handed off my suitcases again to be delivered to my final destination. This parade of welcomers seemed pretty overkill to me, but apparently someone did lose their way getting to the buses, so I’ll let you make your own decision.
An hour and some change passed on the bus, complete with a nonstarter first conversation with my new bus seatmate and an excited rise of voices upon the first sightings of landmarks like the Tokyo Skytree and crossing Rainbow Bridge, and then we arrived at our hotel. It was a gorgeous place and I’ve got nothing bad to say about it at all. Well, more on that later… I set my bags down in my hotel room on the 22nd floor and took in the spectacular view of the Shinjuku government building: picture coming at the end of this post. But since I was the only one in the room at that point and it was about 5pm I decided to take a walk around the area in hopes of happening upon a convenience store for some caffeine. “It’s Japan,” I thought, “there has to be a convenience store right outside.” Wrong. I went on a 30 minute walk looping around the downtown area and found no sign of anything but concrete, glass, power lines, and steel, except for one street densely lined with trees and cicadas roaring so loud they muted all the other sounds of the city. As I was rounding the corner to head back to the hotel in defeat, I spotted two (two!) conbini that I would have seen immediately had I turned right rather than left at the start. Oh well, at least the cicadas were pretty damn cool.
I returned to the hotel room after a rice ball and some tea and found my roommate there unpacking, and it was none other than my old friend from the plane ride! We shared a laugh over the coincidence and would only learn later that mostly everyone was set up in the same way. Because it was still only around 7pm, we wanted to go out and acclimate as much as possible to the time change so we could be ready for orientation the next morning (read: we wanted some food and beer). After tidying up and showering we found some others who were taking their circadian rhythm adjustment seriously and ended up with a group of five. One of the members, more knowledgeable of the area, suggested a ramen place for dinner. And for my first actual Japanese ramen in three and a half years, it was… quite filling! After the soup and a beer we wandered through one of the classic Tokyo neighborhoods, with advertisements and storefronts stretching stories into the sky and bathing the streets in their bright glow. It was here we happened upon bar, not a bar, but BAR. Finding the owner’s naming sense quite agreeable we decided to patronize BAR, and entered the building and went down the stairs into its basement location. After a nice cocktail and some lighthearted conversation about our excitements and worries for our new journey we all decided it was about time we headed back to the hotel to await our orientation the next morning.
