Day 2...

Day 2 – 1st July 2008
It seems Yoshihara Sensei drew the short straw, because she was volunteered to take us shopping for the essentials like bedding, food etc... We spent a small fortune, but it was mostly stuff that will be left behind in the ‘intern apartment’ for the next person.

Yoshihara sensei is very nice, all day she was trying to speak English, which is actually pretty good, and she was also teaching us some simple Japanese which we appreciated.

After we unpacked, we headed to a local noodle restaurant which serves traditional Japanese food. I got some meat concoction and cold noodle things. On the whole, the food was good. Yoshihara sensei insisted on paying for it, which was very nice of her.

After the meal, we were dropped off at our apartment where we promptly fell asleep. A few hours later Arakawa sensei woke us up when he came round to our place with loads of goodies, new carpets, light bulbs etc... The carpet was a doddle to lie; it seems that the room is a standard size, so the carpet is like a giant rug, which (almost) fits perfectly!

Arakawa sensei left us to it, and we fell asleep again – obviously still jet lagged.
Later on, Lawrence-san turned up from work to show us how to get to the train station, and how the trains work etc... we got on at Wado station (not the karate style, just a coincidence), and took the train one stop to Kuki station where we had planned to get something to eat, so we had a stroll down one of the local streets. However, by this time it was quite late and everywhere was either closed or was closing, so we decided to turn back and head home. Me being the new gaijin, i didn’t realise that the roads we were crossing had a ‘green man’ on them, so i walked straight over road when i wasn’t supposed to. When i realised, i turned round and made a ‘whoops!’ sort of look, much to the amusement of a local Japanese lady. Lawrence shouted something like ‘you gaijin are crazy!'.

The rest of the journey home was pretty uneventful; we checked our email at Lawrence’s place and picked up our bags and took them home to unpack.
We were pretty hungry after shopping; unpacking and sleeping all day, so we tried our hands at cooking Japanese style. Which was pretty tasty...