Week 1 - Training

So the trip to Japan was looooong. It consisted of a whole lot of sitting and squirming around, trying to find a comfortable way to sit, which grew more impossible by the hour. My flight took 19 hours in all. Four hours to San Francisco and 15 hours to Japan. I spent the trip watching Robert Downey Junior's sexy behind running around 19th century England as Sherlock Holmes. I also got a chance to finally see Breakfast at Tiffany's. I absolutely LOOOVE old movies and this movie was pretty good. The thing that I found really ironic about the movie, though, is that there was an Asian character (I'm pretty sure he was supposed to be Japanese even though in old movies, they didn't allow too many people of color on the big screen so he may have been a caucasian person in costume) named Mr. Yunioshi, who constantly complained at the main character "Holly Golightly"(played by Audrey Hepburn). Now Mr. Yunioshi was a short man with crooked, bucked teeth, a bowl haircut, thick bifocals and a terrible accent. You know, "You-ah too loud!" "I call cops!" and stuff like that. It was really cringe-worthy, but I couldn't help but to ask why they would play a movie like this on the way to Japan. I just thought it was weird.

Anywho, after 19 long hours, I finally arrived in Japan and during the process of jumping through hoops at the airport, and meeting up with the trainer, I managed to find several of my fellow trainees who were also preparing to go the training session. We gathered into a little group of maybe 13, 14 people and took a bus trip (that took forever - about 2 hours) to the training center. By this time, it was like 9pm and everyone was exhausted. We were hauling our luggage around the streets of Okayama and praying that we would finally reach our destination so that we could go to sleep. It seemed like the stronger the desire to sleep became, the more unbearable the physical and mental exhaustion became, the more tedious information our trainer wanted to tell us. "You guys will probably want to check out this grocery store in the future, but just know that they aren't open 24 hours a day, soooo . . . yeah . . . um, well, let's keep going." I swear, we all just looked at him with blank stares the whole time he spoke. Next thing you know, he lead us to the dorms where we would be staying. I looked at the list of room numbers with corresponding names and saw that my name was not on the list.

"Oh!" he said, "About 6 of you will be staying in a hotel that's a couple blocks away. After we get everyone settled into these dorms, we'll walk you guys over to the hotels and get you guys checked in." At that moment, I couldn't figure out if I wanted to die or kill this guy.

But when we got checked into the hotel and I found out that there was free breakfast every morning along with wi-fi internet in the lobby, I realized that I wanted to kiss him. I jumped into bed that night and woke up bright and early at 4am in the morning (due to jet lag) and then decided to hop downstairs and get on the internet until breakfast started. Breakfast consisted of some strange ish, and that was the moment I realized that I was not in Kansas anymore. Everything tasted pickled. Pickled cranberries, pickled lettuce, and pickled peppers. There was also soup and of course, rice balls (which I would soon discover comes with EVERYTHING).

So that was my routine the whole week that I was in training. I would wake up bright and early, get on the internet, talk to the manfriend and eat my free breakfast. The first 2 days that I stayed in the hotel, my roomate and I hung out and we explored the town we were in as well as the city that was next door, Kurashiki (the same city that would soon be my home). We were told that the first week would be very intense, and this caused some of the people in my training group to get a little tense, but for the most part, everyone hung out and even bonded a little. There was 15 of us all together and we had a great time until the weekend ended and we had to start going to the training sessions.

Now I've been involved in quite a few intense vetting processes. The most intense having been my experiences pledging a certain sorority (that need not be mentioned.) After going through that bull-ish, I've always kind of felt like I could go through pretty much anything and wasn't really stressed when they kept warning us about how "intense" this process would be. A few of my fellow trainees were upset (one of the girls even decided to quit without telling anyone) but I'd say we all did a good job. Training consisted of 9 long hours every day of listening to lecture after lecture and then having to actually regurgitate this information in the form of a lesson geared toward the Japanese children we would be teaching. It was nerve wracking to pull off, but thank God we were all a pretty tight knit group. It helps to resolve the pressure, when you have a bunch of grown American adults acting like Japanese children who are enjoying your class lesson. So day after day of this, we finally reached the end of training and the grand finale would be giving a lesson to actual Japanese children. Now this experience was no joke. The kids were not going to fake anything for us. If they weren't interested, they would get up in the middle of your lesson and just walk away. Fortunately, I was the first person to go and did my best to grab the kid's attention. It worked for the most part, but by the 3rd presentation, one of the children picked up a slipper and threw it at the girl who was giving her lesson. It looked something like this . . .

So training week ended with all of the trainers taking the trainees out to dinner. And me as well as 2 of the girls managed to get the most serious of the trainers drunk off of this really really good rose flavored wine. It was splendid and a wonderful way to end my first week in Japan. After this, everyone from my training group split off, going to their respective schools all over Japan. I got on the train and watched as everyone waved goodbye. I was nervous, but ready to get to my school and wondering if my new coworkers would be as cool as the people I'd met and befriended in training.