This morning I left the house early to meet N-san at Chizu station. I have Tottori prefectural orientation in Tottori city for today and tomorrow, so she rode the train with me. Three stops away from the city, two other JETs came on the train, R from New Zealand and L from USA, so we sat together and chatted.
When we got to the city there was still a lot of time to spare, so firstly we dropped our baggage at the Washington Hotel and then we all went to a cafe in the station for some iced coffee. I was never a coffee drinker before, but there is a lot of sweetened coffee here and I’ve been so exhausted that its almost becoming a habit.
After coffee, we told N-san that we would be okay on our own, so she left to go back to Chizu. However, as soon as she left we realized we had no idea how to get across the street. I discovered a tunnel under the road, so we followed that. Along the way we picked up another JET from USA, C. There were two exits - one went to the street and one went into the basement level of the Daimaru department store. We decided to kill some more time in there and wandered around. After not too long we thought it would be best to head to the building for orientation. We thought it would be a short 5 or 10 minute walk, but it ended up being more like 20 minutes! It was getting a bit hot and humid by this point, and it didn’t help that several other JETs who live in the city passed us on their bikes!
We finally arrived at the building, which is huge with a cathedral-like ceiling all made of glass. It was like a giant greenhouse. Our orientation was held upstairs in a conference room. I sat beside L. Here’s what our schedule was like for the first day:
10:30am-10:50am Registration
11:00am-11:05am Opening remarks
11:05am-11:10am Explanation of schedule
11:10am-11:40am Basic information about work and life in Tottori (CIRs and ALTs)
11:40am-11:45am Introduction of Tottori AJET and senpai JETs
11:55am-12:55pm Lunch
1:05pm-1:35pm Basic information (continued)
1:45pm-2:45pm ALT specific information
2:45pm-2:55pm Break
2:55pm-4:45pm Panel discussion with senpai JETs
After that we all walked to the Washington Hotel near the station, which is where we were staying overnight. We checked in, picked up our luggage, and went to our rooms to rest a bit before the AJET party at 6:30pm. We were also able to rent wireless routers from the hotel, which was awesome!
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| My room at the Washington Hotel. |
Around 6:20pm I went down to the lobby and met up with M (from AJET, and who was leading us all to the beer garden for the party) and the other JETs going out. We walked over to the beer garden, which is on the roof of the Daimaru department store, so not too far away. It is normally like Y3,200 or so for the beer garden, which is nomihodai (all you can drink) and tabehodai (all you can eat). But there was a coupon for Y700 off, which was great! There were lots of different drinks, mostly alcoholic, but some soft drinks too. The food was definitely different and I had no idea what most things were except for the potato wedges, chicken balls, edamame, and escargot. I only had one glass of alcohol, so overall it was a bit of a waste of money in that way, but it was fun to be there and I enjoyed meeting a lot of people. The beer garden closed at 9:30pm, so we crammed onto the elevator and met up on the sidewalk below. I don’t want to talk about it much for discretion, but some people were super drunk already, so it was getting pretty wild and people wanted to continue the party! We decided to got to karaoke, so a senpai JET led us to a spot, stopping along the way at a convenience store for more alcohol and fried chicken. We got a big room there and sang for almost two hours (a surprisingly good selection of songs actually, although the Celine Dion was questionable). I didn’t really drink much, but everyone was so fun and I love karaoke, so it was a really great experience anyway. Actually, afterwards I felt really energized and like it was good for opening up before going to teach a bunch of energetic kids. A few of us decided to call it a night around 11:30pm, so we paid and walked back to the hotel. I was a bit wired still, so I stayed up and finally crashed around 1am.
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