-------------- Thursday, September 18, 2014
Our Fulbright orientation stuff started a little later than
the previous day, so I “slept” in until 8am (meaning I woke up sometime early
in the night/morning and kept waking up and falling back asleep). I woke up
from dreaming I was a groundhog being hunted by an exterminator with a
determination to make us go extinct. I got up and got ready and went down to
breakfast at 9am. At 9:50am, I left the dining room to sit in the lobby. When
we all gathered, we handed the front desk our keys and walked to the Fulbright
office.
Rather than the shorter, harder to remember route, this time
we followed Aoyama-doori (Blue Mountain Street), a major street with 2 or 3
lanes on each side (plus maybe a median). Although the route is much simpler,
it took longer, so we were almost late.
At orientation the Fulbright staff and a Fulbright alumni
shared advice and filled us up to the brim with information by the time we
finished at 3pm. The first half, up to 12:15, focused on the Fulbright alumni’s
experiences. She told us about great memories, challenges, taking
opportunities, and other advice about being a Fulbrighter in Japan. She also
answered our questions. One piece of advice she gave is not to worry too much
about problems. Even is a problem seems big, if you chip away at it, and are
willing to ask for help when you need it, almost any problem can be solved.
We ate together for lunch at an Italian restaurant
(Salvatore?). Since we were a large group, we were seated outside. A foreign
(Italian?) man in charge (perhaps the owner), was our waiter. He spoke broken
English mixed with his native language, but we had no trouble communicating.
The lunch style was a buffet set where you choose one main dish—pizza or
pasta—and then you get the rest of your food from a buffet table with items
such as cheesy penne pasta, broccoli and shrimp salad, regular salad, focaccia
bread, potato wedges, etc. I chose a sauceless pizza topped with cheese, bacon,
and Japanese pumpkin. It was surprisingly good. The crust of the pizza wasn’t
as thick as American pizza, and it wasn’t crunchy like thin-crust pizza. It was
soft but thin: a mix of both.
Although the food was good, we were a bit put off by where
we were sitting. We were a bit in a dark corner with a potted tree and
dead-looking potted sticks, the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes.
Japanese mosquitoes are small and black and sneaky.
I had left my bug spray in the Fulbright office, so we were defenseless. At
least half of us were bitten. I somehow even managed to get bitten on my hand.
I hadn’t even noticed being bitten. My hand had just suddenly become sensitive
and slightly itchy, and after scratching a while I noticed a pale swelling
bump. With mosquitoes so sneaky, I don’t blame the Japanese for freaking out
about dengue fever.
The second half focused on going through informational
papers. It seems that I’m the only Fulbrighter who is looking for an apartment;
everyone else chose dorms or apartment-style dorms provided by their host
universities. One Fulbrighter however, is staying in a hotel in Tokyo for the
year, since he is confined to a wheelchair and that is the only available
accessible accommodations. Japanese rooms tend to be too small for wheelchairs,
lack elevators and/or ramps, and have a step up or down between the room and
the bathroom.
After orientation, I walked back to the hotel with two of
the other Fulbrighters. We stopped in a pharmacy store (kinda of like Rite-Aid
or CVS) that had lotions, makeup, shampoo, and medicines. We found the bug
spray, which is called 虫よけスプレー(mushi yoke spray). I saw one for kids, which came
in a small lotion tube, but said it was a powder on the label.
Back at the hotel I took a nap, which didn’t refresh me, and
then I worked on composing a letter to ask a Tohoku University Economics
faculty member for help finding housing. I didn’t get to finish, though,
because I went to Shibuya (which is very crowded at 8pm) to eat sushi with some
of the other Fulbrighters. In the end, we couldn’t find a wheelchair-accessible
sushi to eat at (the only one we DID find was really crowded with 10-15 people
waiting outside. We ended up eating at a shabu-shabu place. Shabu-shabu is a
type of meal where flavored broth is prepared in a huge iron bowl that is
heated on the table, and you are provided with thinly sliced meat and
vegetables and tofu to cook in it as needed. However, the shabu-shabu was very
expensive (3,600 yen per person, or about $36 per person), so we ate various
other set meals instead.
The wheelchair-bound Fulbrighter and his friend/assistant
had to leave early, since their hotel has a curfew of 11pm (in addition to not
providing the basic room services of complimentary towels, and changing the
towels and sheets).
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