The Eve of Departure

Today I went into Toronto for the mandatory farewell pre-departure orientation thingy, which was held in Hart House on the UoT campus.

It ran from about 1pm until 5pm. A representative from the travel agency went over the procedures for tomorrow, our departure day! At this point we also got back our passports with the visas and some other necessary items for the trip. Then we were told to leave the room for about an hour, while the catering company set up for the farewell reception.

I think most of us were starving at this point, so when we were called back into the room, we basically swooped in on the food like a bunch of vultures. There were plates of desserts - including nanaimo bars! On the other side of the room was a huge cheese tray and a bunch of breads and dips. There were servers with all sorts of appetizers as well. The sliders were freaking amazing! There was also chicken satay skewers, crab cakes, samosas, sweet potato and shrimp dumpling things...it was incredible. They really feed us well here!

At the reception we were divided into regions. Since there are only 3 of us going to Chugoku, we were grouped with Shikoku. Still, our table was really empty, which was kind of awkward...especially when we did a cheer competition and ours was by far the worst. I'm really looking forward to meeting the other Tottori JETs in Tokyo!

After we had stuffed our faces, there were a bunch of speeches, mostly what I took away from them is "it will be hot." At the end we all did a big kampai (cheers) with sparkling wine. We took a group photo too, but I'm curious as to how that turned out because there were so many of us I think half of our faces will be missing from the photo.

I wasn't really sure what was going on after that, so I meandered around until I somehow managed to politely barge in on the conversation 2 girls were having. There were also some reporters around, so one lady asked us some questions about how we were feeling and where we were going. Eventually the room became pretty empty, so I decided to say goodbye.

At home we frantically finished up packing. We have a few things left to do in the morning, but otherwise I think we're pretty set. Our flight leaves at 2:05pm, but we have to be at the airport by 10:30am, so its a fairly early morning unfortunately.

We ended up adding another suitcase to our pile, just a small one though. We still are under the baggage limit, so that's fine. We are still going to ship all this stuff from Narita, but I recently discovered that the plane to Tottori is so small that carry-on suitcases don't fit, so we have to check our carry-on bags anyway. Which is kind of annoying, but oh well. Still less to deal with than a big suitcase.

I should be able to get internet at the hotel and I'm planning to post all about Tokyo Orientation. I'm hoping internet will be set up at home in Chizu soon, but I really have no idea how long it will take. I'll post here as soon as I can, and I will probably end up backdating a bunch of posts about our first few days.