Confessions of A Working Girl

First of all, I totally meant to write this last week. Keeping up a blog is a little harder than I’d anticipated though. >.< (Note the as yet unfinished entries for Germany, England and France) Anyway, with this entry I’ll start with the plane ride from England to Japan on January 9th…So I left Oxford early in the morning because of the two hour bus ride to the airport, and then it was suggested that I should be at the airport by about 3 hours before, just to be on the safe side. Check in this time was relatively simple, but I wasn’t about to trust that, so I was on edge the whole three hour wait. I don’t think I relaxed until the plane actually took off–until that point I was still worried that it would be cancelled for some reason.I flew with Virgin Atlantic. It was a twelve hour plane ride, which seemed a lot shorter since every seat had its own small tv and there were a bunch of movies to pick from. I watched Magician’s Apprentice, Easy A, and part of Marmaduke. The rest of the time I was either reading or playing a game on the kindle…I didn’t manage to fall asleep at all, though I tried. The plane landed in Japan around 10am. It was neat, watching as we came in…the wide open spaces got more crowded, and as we got closer to the ground, I could make out details.I collected my luggage and, after changing some money using the ATM and buying a manga magazine, I sat down to wait the three or four hours until someone from KCP came to pick us up. I attempted to translate the magazine for a while, but it didn’t work too well. I also got up at one point and got some maps from information…one of the people that had been on the plane had stood next to me while we were waiting for our luggage and he said that the airport was pretty much the only place that you could find free english maps.When the people from the program got there, we still had to sit and wait, since not everyone had arrived yet. We didn’t end up leaving the airport until about 5:30pm. At least I didn’t have my big suitcase to deal with–they sent it on ahead, since we would be taking the metro to the place where we were meeting our host families.We met the host families at one of the stations. The meeting seemed a little abrupt, but then, at that point, it was already almost 7, I think… On the metro ride with my host mom, I found out that she spoke english–a relief and surprise–I had been told that she didn’t speak any. Obviously I want to try speaking Japanese as much as possible, but it is nice to know that she’ll understand even if I’m speaking in English.That night we had dinner, then was a shower, then bed.The next morning, I had to leave the apartment by about 7:45, since KCP is about an hour away. For the first day, my host mom brought me all the way there, so that I would know the way. Orientation began at nine…it took a while, since the principal and the speakers were speaking in Japanese. After they spoke, their speech was translated (one at a time) into three different languages–Korean, Chinese, and English. Orientation went for two days, then class started.I was a little startled–class was completely in Japanese! The teachers’ aren’t even supposed to use English when talking to a student, even outside of classtime (though it does happen.) But the classes are fun, if a little long….to be continued.

1 Comment » Dad:

January 22nd, 2011 @ 1:54 pm Keep those blogs coming whenever you can…there are those that keep checking