First post in Japan

Hey, sorry everyone, it's been a while since I have posted.

First I was without Internet, and then super busy, so I was unable to post before.  I'll explain.

After my last post, I arrived in the Japanese airport - nothing special about it exactly, it looked like any airport would.  I had to go through the customs area and fill out forms and then I met with one of the staff from the study abroad program.  Me and the other students dropped any luggage we didn't need for the next day at a sort of shipping place with a certificate already filled out for us by the school.  That's how we got any heavy luggage transported to a host family's house even if they didn't have a car.

After that, we were given money for bus fare and took a bus from the airport.  It was one of those large tour-sized buses, although in Japan they are apparently called limousine buses, which was pretty funny.  After taking the bus I arrived at a hotel which all the students stayed at for one night before meeting host families.

The hotel was also pretty normal apart from the bathroom which had a super fancy toilet including a bidet and heated seating.  Oh and that it was connected to a sort of indoor mall on one side.  All the students ended up eating at a nearby restaurant with money provided by the school.  Unfortunately, nothing on the menu was in English so it was extremely hard to pick anything.  So, I ended up picking one of the items on the menu which had the least choices so that I couldn't screw it up.  It was an average meal as far as the menu went, but it was humanly impossible for me to eat all of what I was given, even though I tried my best since it is rude not to finish meals in Japan and perhaps in some degree everywhere.  Also, my chopstick skills were horrible when I started but I had improved by the end when I figured out that holding them closer to the end improved everything.

While we were walking around the area of the hotel we checked out a few tiny stores but the best one that we walked by was a Denny's.  Because you know, if you were in Japan you'd want to go to an American chain restaurant.

That's pretty much it for the hotel area.  I enjoyed that one day since I didn't yet have to meet my host family which worried me most, since from the emails that we had exchanged I had gotten the feeling that my host family was not good at English, although better than I was at Japanese.