Kick Off
I’ve been to more than a couple countries on this blue Earth, Papua New Guinea and Mexico to name a couple, and now I find myself in The Land of the Rising Sun; Japan. Why I can’t escape from this place I don’t know. Actually, I do know. It’s because the food is so freaking good. Whenever I think of leaving, I think of how much I’m going to miss those crappy izakayas, convenience store bentos, and incredible sushi joints. Not just yet.
In The Beginning
From the time I was hired, to the time I landed at Narita airport was exactly five days. Five days to cancel my internet, say goodbye to my gramps and grams, to get my ticket, and to get on that Japan Airlines bird. The hiring process was easy enough. It was an over the phone interview, and all I had to do was sing a song. I was in like Bindi. There was a big hiccup at the check-in counter, but 7 hours later I landed at Narita. The instructions from my shiny new employer was to find a bus heading up to Mito, Ibaraki. I had no idea where Ibaraki was. All I knew was that I needed to find a bus. Oh yeah, I landed at night. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” someone used to say. I fumbled my way through broken Japanese, aided by my travel dictionary, and I got on a bus heading out to Ibaraki, supposedly. There was another gaijin on my bus, and at the time I really had no idea how common or uncommon gaijin were, so I didn’t really pay him/it any attention. The moment it clicked that we were probably heading to the same mistake (foreshadowing) was when we both got off at the wrong stop. Well, our instructions were to get off at so-and-so stop, and when we did, it was just us two, and we were in the middle of a huge parking lot in the middle of a huger nowhere. I had a bad feeling about it. Two foreigners, well I didn’t look like one, but one foreign looking dude, and one Japanese looking foreigner in the middle of nowhere, with no one else in sight seemed like the wrong place to be. Before the bus driver hopped back in and took off I ran up and showed him my print out of the email my employer had sent me. This wasn’t it. Okay, back on the bus, and I have no confirmed to all the other Japanese on the bus that I was a retarded foreigner. At least I looked asian, so they probably just thought I was Chinese. Big thing against Chinese in Japan, by the way. So after talking to my just revealed coworker, we’ll call him Tutu, I was on my way to being an English teacher in Japan. Oh the what adventures are sure to come, no one really knows, but if there’s one thing for certain, it’s that I was in for a bumpy ride.