Tokyo Orientation - Day 3

Our final day of orientation was also spent in seminars/workshops. I was pretty wiped after the first two afternoon workshops, so I decided to take a nap before our prefectural meeting. BAD idea. I set the alarm properly, but I turned it off without hitting the snooze button and told myself “just 10 more minutes.” You can probably guess that I ended up being late (15 minutes!) for my prefectural meeting. I was the only one late, and with the Japanese emphasis on punctuality, it reflected very poorly on me. ^^;;

There was a Canadian embassy event that night, but since my roommate was still packing (we had to ship our luggage from Tokyo to our cities ahead of time because there wouldn’t be enough space on the plane otherwise), we skipped it and went out for dinner on our own. We went down the street to a ramen place and then hit the konbini (convenience store) to buy breakfast for the next morning. (We could’ve had the hotel-provided breakfast, but that was at 6:30am, and we preferred to sleep in.)

Then we walked randomly around Shinjuku—unfortunately we went in the wrong direction and all we saw was construction and office/residential buildings—until about 10pm. (I was pretty amused by the huge glowing and moving crab, though!) When we got back to the hotel, we saw RT and a bunch of other JETs (old and new) hanging around some stairs (“the stoop”) across the street from the hotel. So we joined them and hung out and chatted until around 1:30am. Thus ended our Tokyo orientation.













Pretty much all of the orientation was spent in the company of English speakers, and so even though Tokyo was fun and interesting, it also felt a bit unreal.

Random photos of our accomodations: