Doomii Higashi Funabashi

Well, my flight ended with an eight hour delay. I eventually got to Tokyo around 10:40 local time. I called the director of my program when I got through customs only to be told that the instructions I recieved were useless by that time of night. With the help of a friendly, English speaking Japanese couple, I caught the last train out of the Airport and took a taxi from there to the place where my orientation was held. I finally got to the place where I was staying by about 12:30 and passed out almost immidiately.

The next couple of days were spent almost entirely in orientation. We sat through long hours of powerpoints and "useful information." Some of this was actually very helpful and some of this was completely useless. However, I endured the first two days and only have one more left.

Today, we moved into our permanent housing. Although I applied for a homestay, I was sent to a dorm, Higashi Funabashi. It is located in Funabahsi city, a suburb of Tokyo wich is actually a legitimate city. The room is larger than I expected and has about 9 other people from my program, 4 of which are on the year long program and have been here since August. At least one other person in this dorm also applied for a homestay, so I wasn't alone in my disappointment. I am putting up some pictures of my room with this post. I will post again when I have more to say than the food here is excellent, which subsequently it it.

Airport Travel

Despite the fact that this blog is for my stay in Japan, I am writing this first post in the Denver Airport, which was not initially part of my travel plans.

Apparently there was some sort of medical emergency up in first class. After asking if there was a doctor aboard a few times in both Japanese and English, the Captain announced that we were landing in Denver in 20 minutes. After about an hour on the ground, they informed us that our current flight crew could not complete the trip at this point because the extra couple of hours would put them over the legal maximum. We are now waiting for a new crew which will be able to fly to Tokyo and the new scheduled departure time is now 6:50 local time. We arrived something like noon local time, so this does add about 6-7 hours to a 13 hour flight.

It could have been worse, however, because at first they were threatening not to let us deplane before the new flight crew arrived. However, we didn't spend more than 2 hours total on the ground before they let us off. I suppose it wouldn't be fitting to travel by air without massive delays. That's all the news that's fit to print at the moment.