Disoriented at Orientation

8:00 pm

It’s now 8:00 pm and I’m battling jet lag and losing. I think I will make this a quiet evening despite having the option of going out with a group of people from my prefecture. But I’m not just being a sleep-deprived wimp. The price is rather prohibitive. I would have to pay 4500 Yen for a set meal and all I can drink. The set meal isn’t vegetarian and the drinking portion is as unappealing to me now as it would be back home. So, when you do the conversion, I would be paying about $45 US dollars to watch a bunch of future colleagues get pissed. Sure, I’ll be hanging out with future colleagues, but I think I might want to reserve that for a less financially intrusive opportunity.

Today was actually a bit of a blur. The morning was occupied by a set of speakers standing in front of 1500 incredibly moist teachers. Tokyo’s humidity isn’t especially accommodating to that large number of people in a room at once. We were given stacks of papers, books and brochures to take with us to our new homes, but they ended up serving only as fans to keep cool.

Right now, I honestly can’t remember much of the content I tried to ingest. I only remember thinking that one of the presenters’ English was good enough to make decent jokes – a rarity in my limited experience here.

After a tasty-enough lunch, more speakers awaited then a video about a day in the life of an assistant language teacher. Made in 1993, the age was showing on this Hollywood blockbuster. An ALT and a JLT walk past a classroom where an orchestra is playing. ‘Is that the music class?’ the ALT inquires in a true showing of his mastery of Japanese culture. It was a good watch filled with unintentional humour.

We then had a series of workshops where I attended talks about teaching at the elementary level, traveling as a JET and being a vegetarian in Japan. Then again, looking at what I wrote above, I already told you about this a bit’

I tried having a fifteen-minute nap, but I think a whole two minutes was had before dinner. I’m now digesting and thinking about going outside for a few photos, but I don’t think I will last too long before I pass out. So, it might just be an early-ish night and hopefully I won’t wake up at five in the morning, and unable to resume sleeping.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 26th, 2004 at 8:00 pm. It is filed under Blog, Japan, JET Programme, Travel and tagged with japan, Travel, travel log. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.