7/9: First day in Japan

Today I woke up at 7:00am, took a shower and found some cereal and milk Junko had left me, so I ate that for breakfast. It was a nice relaxing and continued to get settled. At 10:00 Juno took me to the city hall to get me registered as an alien, and to get my health insurance set up. The person who helped us knew Junko, introduced me as “Karisu sensai.” The lady knew that there was going to be a new English teacher coming, but was waiting to see who it was before she sent her kids. Apparently, when she learned that it was me, she approved and told Junko that she would send her kids to my class.

The next item on the agenda was to find a bank, and get information on how I could pay bills in America, while I am getting paid in yen. We got the information we needed, and concluded that we should check around to some more banks. That would be the only bank we checked out that day though. Before someone can open a bank account, to sign important documents, you need to have a stamp. I don’t know the real reason, but my assumption is that it is hard to have a unique signature when you write in Hiragana or Katakana. So, I needed a stamp pen. We went to this stamp shop and ordered a stamp.

Before we went back to the seminary, we stopped by the Co-op, and picked up some food for lunch. I was invited to the Sisaki’s (Junko and Hisashi) home for cold Ramen, but we needed to pick up supplies first. When we got back to the seminary, we had a wonderful lunch, with different Juices, cold ramen and, Haagen-daz ice cream for dessert. My findings with Japanese juice, is that it was way better then American juices. They taste all natural and rich in flavor. Following lunch, I though it would be nice to walk around a little bit, and explore the area I am living in. It was very humid and cloudy, but luckily it did not rain at all. I walked across a bridge that crosses a river before the road curves up into the hills. Walking in the other direction, I found it to be much more populated with many houses and apartments. The roads are very narrow, and everything is squeezed together. Just down the road is the middle school. There were tons of kids outside playing baseball in uniforms. One thing that caught my attention was that it was rare to see an overweight kid. This a very different sight compared to what you would find in America, where you would see tons of “Twinkie” stuffing kids.

For dinner, the Sasaki’s invited me, the Nordis family (Bonita and Arnie), and their friends for dinner. Since it looked like it was going to rain, we decided to eat inside the fellowship hall. The food we ate was quite amazing, we ate: Pork, chicken, onions, carrots, potato’s, beef and rice. After we ate we all ended up chatting for quite a long time before I retired back to my room and went to bed.