First day in Tokyo

We woke up the next day at the hotel at Narita airport, went upstairs and had breakfast. I had a little taste of everything, even the fish which was decent, and they even had french fries for breakfast... but the best thing they had was this bread that was pretty much cinnamon rolls turned into a loaf of bread.

We then went downstairs and formed into our small groups, and I got paired with Zach, Kathryn, Shenice, Alicia, Remi, and Oh Ji (whom we later named are group after, the Genki Ojii-sans), who all are just completely awesome people.


We rode the bus from Marroad at Narita Airport to Sophia University (Jouchi in Japanese). It took 3 hours with all the traffic, but it was ok because we got to get to know each other in the group.

We picked our group name (see above), and we got to see a lot of cool things going into Tokyo, like the Tokyo television building

and the Tokyo Tower



...even he couldn't believe how long it took

We finally got to the campus and we met our groups sempai (upper class student).

We locked our stuff away and she showed us around the university. Showed us the buildings, the cafeterias, the convenience store, and book stores. I got curry and spaghetti for lunch, weird combo, and a flan snack at the convenience store.


We went back to building 11 and had a little orientation over what to expect coming up and over the guidelines that were in our handbook. We then went to our hotel, Tokyo Green Palace hotel near Sophia University, and dropped our stuff at our rooms, and I got a new room mate for the night John who is in group B so I don't see him much anymore.

CIEE then took us on the trains and we went to a nice traditional Japanese restaraunt for dinner. We had to sit on the floor in the seiza position (on your knees on the pillows) but most of us switched to Indian style.

It started off with just hotplates of meat and veggies,

some shrimp puff chips, and some chicken and french fries, but as the night went on they kept bringing more and more food, till we were past full, like sushi, and tofu, and eggplant, and so on...


Later that night my group and some others decided to go out and karaoke. We asked the people at the front desk where a good place was and they showed us on a map. We got there, and we had our own private room to sing it out, with two mics and a tamberine. We sang Journey

and some Bohemium Rhapsody, Thriller, some Japanese songs, and a little Red Hot Chilli Peppers. We ended up drinking a lot of sake.

There was a a group of Japanese business men next door and they were crazy, dancing around.

We went back to the hotel after that and I got to go online for a bit and shower off. I then went to bed anxious, for the next day I was going to meet my host family.