Sightseeing from home

A couple of weeks ago, a friend at work told us that on a clear day the apartments on Odaiba have a view of Mount Fuji. Every day since then I've been looking out our window in the morning just to check. Today it finally happened: the weather was beautiful and the usual morning haze had blown out with last night's storm. There were incredible clouds over the bay and in the background you could see the mountains very clearly.

Payoff

Our first week of Japanese class has been a great although difficult success. Last Thursday we woke up at 6:30am to make it to our first class with Yamazaki-sensei. Class starts at 9:30am and being on time means arriving at 9:15. Half the students had semester orientation that day so class ended early. We only had time to introduce ourselves and go over the essentials: "Excuse me", "I'm sorry", and "I'm very sorry".

Our second class was on Monday. By this time we were feeling daring and we slept in until 7:15, but we paid for it when we had to rush out of the house in a frenzy. Fortunately our Monday teacher is Kaneko-sensei, and he was late! But once he got started it was a great class. Kaneko has a gift for hand-puppetry which he demonstrated generously. We had the full three hours and there were a lot of fun games and role-play. We took turns choosing pens from a tote bag and asking the class: "Whose pen?" "That's my pen, thank you." "You're welcome."

All of this paid off yesterday, when I participated in a group meeting at my husband's department in the University. A local student gave a 1-hour technical presentation followed by what appeared to be a vibrant discussion, all in Japanese. Afterward the department chair asked whether I wasn't bored. I was happy to report that I'm already spotting words I learned from my language class -- I was able to catch about 50 uses of the word "sono", meaning "that".

We're Back

We returned to the States on the 18th of September to take care of the last few moving tasks, and it turned into a month-long trip. But we arrived back in our new hometown of Tokyo last Sunday and we have our first Japanese Language class today at 9:30am. We had one of those foreigner moments when registering (What did that administrator say? Does that mean maybe, or no? But she said okay! Is this rude? aaaaahhh!). So hopefully the first class will go a little smoother...

Useful ATM

We tried a few ATMs in Odaiba and Roppongi, and so far this one is the only one that accepted our US-issued Visa bank card. This particular one is on the 1st floor of Aqua City, but other machines from the same bank are probably just as good.

Views on the weekend

This is the lovely view of boats parked outside Decks shopping mall, near our apartment. They show up just after sunset, in the little bay beside the man-made beach. It fills in the view of Rainbow Bridge very nicely. Apparently it's a widely appreciated sight: the park fills up with couples on walks around the same time as the boats arrive.

Laundry

I learned yesterday why an ironing board and an iron are basic appliances provided at the dorms: shirts come out of the dryer looking like this.

Garbage Island

Yesterday we went to yet another office to get re-entry permission (follow-up to the Alien Registration). This office is located on the isle of garbage. Apparently a lot of garbage is sorted and stored there, along with us foreigners, haha! It lies just across an inlet from the dormitory, but we still had to take two trains to get there. My advice: definitely take a taxi from Rinkai Line Tennozu Isle station to the Tokyo Regional Immigration Bureau building. It's a pretty cheap ride. Otherwise you will be treating yourself to a long walk (25 min.) through a fragrant part of town.

Alien Registration

As a foreigner, you need an Alien Registration Card to get a cell phone in Tokyo (or a bank account). But registration takes 3 weeks. So you can also ask for a registration certificate that says your registration is pending, and use that instead. We went to the Koto City Office to get a ceritificate for Kenji, and his card was ready -- 10 days early! That's a big relief, since a work visa is single-entry and doesn't allow you to leave the country until you're registered. Now we can make our trip to the US later this month.

Tokyo Disney

Yesterday was the second of two sunny days we've had here since August 23. We rode over to Tokyo Disney on the Hotel courtesy bus. The weather was perfect and the crowds weren't too bad, probably because it was a weekday. We rode the Western River Railroad, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Jets, and Space Mountain.

We also saw Goofy's laundry hanging out to dry in ToonTown along with the Swiss Family Treehouse. What a great trip.


A few things are really remarkable about the park. First, there is no trash around anywhere. It's immaculate. Second, they seem to have an obsession with popcorn. We found five flavors: salted, caramel, chocolate, soda, and curry. Yes, that's soda popcorn and curry popcorn. We didn't try all of them, but we did enjoy a whole roast turkey leg which was really popular and had people queuing for quite some time.

Finally, there is a truly amazing variety of costume animal ears on display there! Young, old, girls, guys, it doesn't matter. Everybody loves them and they can be worn in a number of ways: headband style, hat style, clip-on / barrette style. They also may come with a tiny hat or an entire stuffed animal perched on top. Here are a few examples!

FIBA

We made it! Yesterday we took a chance and rode out to the suburbs to see if we could get tickets to the USA-GERMANY game. We headed to Ueno station at 19:30, even though the game had just started. The regional trains are a bit trickier than the subway, since those incredibly helpful route maps with English characters don't apply here. But the ticket office was much less crowded than the ticket machines, and we got tickets for the Saitama Shintoshin station with no trouble. In twenty-three minutes we arrived to find FIBA posters with NBA players plastered *all over* the place!

We ran over to the arena just past half-time and the ticket office had closed. But our trip was saved by a French scalper named Marc who sold us two really good seats for $100. After the game we just had time to grab the last piece of cake from a sold-out Starbucks near the arena before hopping on the train back. This time we had to try our luck at the Japanese-language ticket machine and hope for the best, but it worked out perfectly. We had to reach the subway station before midnight when the last trains leave. We arrived back on Odaiba at 23:50, with time to spare. But we did see a sea of taxis waiting at Shimbashi station for the people who arrived too late.



We also found the string of 24-hour restaurants on street level in front of Aqua City, near the hotel, and we finally got some dinner.

Wow, what a difference there is between the daytime metro and the after-23:00 metro! The people on the subway were smiling, laughing, and talking. I've read that there are a lot of people riding home from the bar on the last train. During the day it's pretty much silent. That was kind of a cool thing to see as well.

First Week Here

So far, we're just getting used to the time difference and taking care of some set-up tasks. We visited the City Office to get Kenji's Alien Registration Card. The folks in the office were very kind and it was surprisingly non-intimidating. Today we got to check out our apartment in the Tokyo International Exchange Center. It was great. The staff are so nice and the building was even better in person than on the internet.

I was hoping we would be able to get tickets to a FIBA World Championship game. USA plays Germany tonight! Maybe we'll just ride out to Saitama and see if it's possible to get the tickets there.

Testing 1-2-3

This is a test to see what the blog pages will look like.