So we all met up after breakfast and were herded onto buses and afterwards onto a plane going up North to Hokkaido. There were about 50 JETs going to Hokkaido this year, which is more than all the other prefectures as far as I remember. Hokkaido is the biggest of the Japanese prefectures, but by far not the most populous. It was populated by the "mainland" (if you can say that) Japanese comparatively late (maybe like 150 years ago) so there's not as much there yet. It might also be the cold and the snow that will probably befall us in two weeks' time. In the morning we still had time to make some last-minute friends and I met lots of nice people going to my area that I might meet up with later.
We were all supposed to be picked up by our respective supervisors at the airport and everybody was freaking out about it, including myself. I imagine things can get really nasty if you have an unsuitable supervisor, especially if your Japanese isn't up to scratch (which hardly anyone's ever is).
I was teamed up with J-san (better not type out ppls real names in a blog), the new ALT in our town and we were picked up by my supervisor, a guy from the board of education and the principal of the local high school. All three of them turned out to be really nice and down-to-earth people when we went to have lunch together. We even had conversations in the car; J-san's Japanese is really good. It turned out though that I really had a hard time understanding normal people's speech, even though there isn't a dialect in Hokkaido. People just speak so friggen' fast. I understand foreigners who speak fluent Japanese much better as they tend to speak a bit more slowly.
The car ride was really exciting. The scenery was getting greener and greener, the houses fewer and fewer and occasionally you could see "beware of the bear" signs. It felt like entering a Canadian forest, not Japanese at all. No monkey, cicadas, or paper lanterns (they all probably got eaten by the bears).
At town hall I was left alone with my supervisor and shown to a desk. After a while she came back and said: "come on let's go meet the mayor". If I'd had a glass of water, I would have spit it all over the place like they do in the movies. The mayor? I'm all small and scared and foreign and sweaty and you want me to meet THE MAYOR?
Fortunately the mayor wasn't in; only the vice-mayor and he doesn't even have his own office.
After we had failed to greet the mayor we went to get myself a mobile phone, which had been one of my supervisor's top priorities. AU offered free phones and I ended up with a bright pink one that I picked because it was the only one left that can be used abroad as well. Since I'm planning on travelling quite a bit, I thought it would be handy, but man is it ugly! It can do all sorts of awesome stuff though: it shows you the news and the weather forecast on its display; you can read e-books and manga on it (some of them pre-installed), watch TV, take photos with 8 megapixels, send three different kinds of e-mail, surf two different kinds of internet etc. You can also attach something cute and dangly to it, which I promptly did.
I have no idea what the first phone bill might look like though, as I didn't really understand much of what the phone selling lady said. She was talking mercilessly fast and in an über-polite form which she had probably memorized by heart and now can't change much about. My supervisor tried to translate some of it into my broken Japanese, but I still didn't understand much of it. There's so much stuff Japanese phones do that seem normal to Japanese people, but are unheard of in Europe. Also, Japanese phones all seem to work in pretty much the same way, which is cool for Japanese ppl, but impossible to grasp for Europeans within only ten minutes. Plus the manual was in Japanese. Oh the fatigue...
After the shopping trip we quickly had a look at my unfinished apartment (it already looked amazing though) and then met up for dinner with K-san (female; she lives right above me in the building) and K-san (male; he sits next to my supervisor at work). The food was yummy, but at this point I was so tired that I couldn't do ANY Japanese anymore. At one point somebody asked me how old I was and I didn't even understand that. Everybody must have thought "omg, what an idiot; who the hell hired her?" etc. and I felt kinda guilty because everyone was being extremely nice and I was just being extremely incompetent.
On top of that I had to spend my first night in a pension and felt really far away and uprooted and alone. I've consulted with other part-time-exiles though and they all said that they kinda broke down the first night on their own. I also know this from experience; it still sucks though. Also, I couldn't sleep because there probably was a huge pond outside somewhere with a choir of frogs making a noise. They'd shut up for a couple of minutes and then just start crying like mad for another few. It really was a bit like an alarm clock that snoozes. So it kept me from sleeping for more than one or two hours.
However, things always look brighter in the morning :)
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