Tokyo Orientation

Arrived in Tokyo. Everyone was talking about how long the flight was, but I was asleep the entire time, so I hardly noticed. I took a pill and passed out, so somehow I managed to avoid doing absolutely anything to pass the time, like reading, or listening to music, or watching one of the three movies they showed (yes, three, and I slept through them all).

Orientation is like a well-oiled machine. Around 1000 JETs arrived in my group on Sunday, from all over the world (but mostly the US). Current JETs and people from CLAIR (the body that runs JET) met us at the airport and led us to the buses that took us to the hotel in Shinjuku in Tokyo. The Keio Plaza Hotel is really nice. It's a big business center, and JET totally took over the place. They even put up notices by the elevator apologizing to the guests for the congestion in the elevators (caused by so many JETs trying to get to the same places all at once). 

The view from my window is of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, which is very exciting. <Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building> Something really cool: the mirror in the bathroom is heated on the part over the sink, so when you get out of the shower and the mirror is all fogged up, that part is not. 

I'm extremely jet-lagged, and it doesn't help that we had to spend the entire day sitting through meetings with very little interruption. I woke up at 5:00 this morning, had breakfast at 7, meetings started at 9 and went all day (with a break for lunch), and at 6:30 there was a welcome reception with some heads of the different ministries involved in JET. At 8:30 my prefectural group are all going out for drinks together. I'm going to go because I want to meet more of the people in my prefecture, but honestly all I want to do is go to sleep, I am so completely exhausted. It's a 13 hour time difference from Boston, so at around 2, 3 pm today, when It was around 1 or 2 am back home, I started to feel like I was about to fall asleep. They say it takes a day for every hour or time difference until you're back on a normal schedule.