First Day...

So first full day in Tokyo and I'm picked up by Lan at 9am from my halls so she can guide me through the Tokyo Metro system and test out my route to college. The main issue is not the mass of different companies and lines and stations, but the station names, which don't mean anything to me…the romanji (roman alphabet version of the Japanese pronunciation refuse to stick in my brain)…weirdly enough the Chinese characters seem to feel nicer over my neurons…odd. Anyway, the whole thing with the different companies running the transport network leads to a rather odd situation, where each company generally enjoys ignoring the existence of the other possible forms of transport thus neglecting to indicate the JR lines and sky train on the metro maps and the whole of the metro system on the sky train maps…interchanges are marked very clearly, but this doesn't help you if you don't know where these lines go or what stations they will pass through…nice.

We get to college and register at the main engineering building…get my student card and some card to enable me to get a discounted travel pass (always good) and various other things I wasn't really in the frame of mind to comprehend…I did what most people would probably do when you have no comprehension of what's going on, doing what I was told, signing for things and hoped for the best. We visited several more admin. Offices to sign more things for stuff, then had a little tour around my new department…which is in the basement of a rather pretty stone building…which has been rather crudely adapted to cope with the whole internet thing which appears to have caught the building by surprise…

Down in the dark corners of our basement (where suitably, very little natural light is allowed to reach… for fear of damaging the delicate skin and eyes of pale and over-worked researchers of mud) you take off your shoes to walk around the office type area where my new desk is but put shoes back on where you enter the lab. Lan goes about introducing me to everyone there, I'm then assaulted for the next half an hour with new (to me) peoples names which I immediately forget as I currently have the memory of a goldfish just hit by a terminal bout of severe amnesia. I'm then asked which desk I want…how would I know what desk I want…they all look the same! I've only been in the room for a while and I haven't quite had time to contemplate the chi flows through the building to optimise my productivity through feng shui, but the other researchers have their own ideas and argue (for more than really necessary) about which is the best desk… I leave them to decide for me…the tiredness has started to squish my brain in ways it should be squished…all in all, cognitive ability has definitely ceased.

I'm then shown around the actual experimental lab, which is amazing! Mostly because it looks like a war zone. TFT and CRT screens are haphazardly stacked on top of each other on random bits of floor space…presumably because they were moved from somewhere else where space was needed for another piece of machinery and dumped somewhere 'temporarily'…it's just that the temporary measure seems to have become more permanent than originally thought…

The equipment of soil element testing is crammed into every available space…there are pipes, tubes, valves and bits of moulds everywhere…and there are lots of people around looking busy.Now it's time for lunch so Lan leads me to one of the college canteens…where there is a big selection of things I've not seen before and can't pronounce, so we chose a set meal…I say 'we' I mean Lan…she also ordered for me…I think at this point any trace of my purpose as an independent human being has vanished…I make myself feel a bit better by choosing some fresh pineapple for desert. It all comes to less that 500yen and there's free cold tea instead of filtered water which will take some getting used to…

After lunch we head over to Koto city offices to register me as the alien I am…we've also been told to get copies of the temporary version of the certificate of alien registration for various other things I also fail to comprehend. We fill in forms, I sign more things and hand over photos. THEN it's back to college to give people that we saw first some forms that we have just gotten…argh!! Too complex.

Lan is still powering around to get me sorted out…and she takes me most of the way home and we try and buy my discounted travel pass…she fills in the little form for me and we get a nice little discount for the metro part of the jounrney…then we head on to Toyosu to get the pass for the yukaromome (sky train) line which is greatly hindered by the 'assistant' who refuses to assist and says that they don't do discounts…highly suspicious…because we know that other people who live where I do and go to the Uni of Tokyo have managed to get them.

I manage to do some food shopping at a newly opened supermarket in Toyosu. Which is fun, because, for a lot of the time I have no idea what I'm buying…the little phrase book I have doesn't cover, what wayway wants to buy to cook herself dinner and make some breakfast…I can't read the bottle labels, and guess what is soy sauce and cooking oil…it's all good fun, but I have no idea if I'm buying what I actually want or not.

After the joy of shopping , I drag myself back, cook, then get ready for bed…or so I think… but actually stay up on the internet, despite my exhaustion…oh well, you can't plan these things can you?