moving training jimminy cricket

phew! it's 8:45. that's the earliest i've gotten to finish a day so far. i flew out of tampa at 7am on sunday. i arrived in narita, japan at 1:30pm monday. granted there was a crazy time shift. 13 hour difference i guess.

so on monday i landed and exchanged my money for yen. like, a lot of it. like, a fat stack of bills. and they're like, oh yeah, this is normal for here, nobody robs you. whatever man, carrying all that money is scary! so i take a bus to a hotel where they had me staying, i check in and take the longest chill out bath and then go back to the lobby to meet all the people coming in from the airport. we head out and take the bus to town and eat dinner. at this point i was really freaking out from the refusal of eye contact from strangers. so we had a crazy shoeless dinner and then walked around, the sake forming a fishbowl that encircled our heads. get back to the hotel and got to sleep around 11pm.

woke up at 4am. went back to bed. woke up at 5am. went back to bed. woke up at 6am. got dressed, went down to have an awesome breakfast and then backed the bags. 8:25 a group of about 15 people -including myself- catch a bus at the hotel, head for the airport/train station. we take the train to tokyo (remember this is a cow herd of 15 noob ass gaijin with suitcases running around lost in a bus station) and then we board the shinkansen... er i mean we MISS the shinkansen to Mishima station, Hamamatsu. so we take another Shinkansend on which we have no reserved seats but it was not crowded at all (monday circa noon). so, now we're in Hamamatsu and we walk to our next hotel, drop off our stuff and go to lunch. after that we go to this like, office place where i guess you can rent a room for a day and we have orientation until about 8pm.

at this point me and this guy Kellen go to a tiny ass ramen shop. Kellen and i are standing outside of the shop for like 5 minutes, afraid to go in. finally he pushes me in and the fun begins. the cook's lip is just twitching like an electronic toothbrush and the only other patron was right out of a comic book. we had good ramen and some lessons in japanese. this made me feel really great because up to this point i felt as if i was dirt to every japanese, but the comic book guy was all smiles and would look us in the eye and explain words. so that was a relief and now i feel a lot more comfortable. so, after food we head back to the hotel massimo and hit the sack.

next morning i'm up at 4am. go back to sleep. wake up at 6 and get dressed and head down to the lobby. breakfast is coffee bread and yogurt. pretty good though. 9am we all meet at the rented office space again and do training till 6pm. then we head to dinner, me, kellen, matt, and oh hell those are the only names i can remember. but there were 4 other people and they are all cool kids. but none of that is even noteworthy compared to this. matt tells us this story. i don't even know if i can express the insanity.... basically all the stress of this adventure, and all the new people and experiences... well when you hear funny shit you laugh... and you laugh hard and painfully. i've only experienced it once before and that was in Sicily under nearly identical circumstances. but as far as Matt's story... i can't tell it. i will definitely post a link to it if i can convince him to put it online. it is so funny and sad and every emotion all at the same time but multiplied by the circumstances of our situation (strangers among ourselves, in a strange country, in a strange country). but holy god i almost threw up crying laughing the story was so crazy.

anyways, now it's 9:05 and i am going to bed. it's going to be awesome sleeping. peace.