I am currently sitting in my "Weekly Mansion" (which is basically an furnished apartment one can rent for a relatively short period of time) after a nice day. Now that I have a chance to breathe I can update you all on recent events.
I flew into Tokyo on September 17th and immediately met another Fulbrighter (from Colorado College) at Narita Airport. We were able to go to the hotel together and get to know each other a little on the way, which made things smoother and (thankfully) less introspective. Orientation began the next day.
Orientation was a fairly smooth and enjoyable process. I met the other 14 Fulbrighters and the head of Fulbright in Japan, Mr. Saterwhite, as well as the extremely helpful office staff. Everyone was nice, and to my surprise, not pretentious in the least. Although orientation was only a few days long, I felt like I got to know everyone to a decent extent.
My adviser was kind enough to make the trip up to Tokyo to meet me, and we were able to chat for a time. He is extremely friendly and fluent in English, which is great. I don't, however, believe I will be spending too much time with him, and he seems to have assigned me a tutor in his place.
Side Note: Of the 14 other Japan Fulbrights, no one is doing an economics project, and only one is living on the island of Kyushu. Two are living in the frigid north of Hokkaido, three in the Kansai area, one in Shikoku and there rest all over Honshu (the big main island). Two are actually in Tsukuba, which is only about 45 minutes away from Tokyo.
On Sunday I took a flight to my new home of Fukuoka, Kyushu and was greeted by a Mr. Hashimoto, a first year economics masters student. Fukuoka is an interesting place, if for nothing else, because of it's airport, which is located almost directly in the middle of the city. Planes are constantly flying down into the city, and Jumbo-jets flying extremely close to high rises is an image down-right startling to an American such as myself. I definitely haven't gotten used to it yet, but I do enjoy it as an interesting novelty of sorts.
He took me to my weekly mansion and we chatted on the way. Going for roughly 95% English (during orientation) to 100% Japanese was an abrupt change, but it was smoother than I thought. Hashimoto was appreciative of the fact that I didn't have too many problems with my Japanese, because he confessed that he'd been practicing English phrases all day. We had an adventure finding the weekly mansion. It took us about one hour of driving around the same neighborhood, while Hashimoto feverishly tried to get the real estate agent to concisely explain where the heck the place was. It ended up being on a street so narrow that cars dare not enter. After that he showed me a little bit of Kyushu University and I met some of the other masters students.
The Hakozaki campus of Kyushu University (KyuDai) is a strange site. It contains the Faculty of Letters, Economics, and Law, which is great because pretty much all of my interests as far as classes go are divided into these three areas. The campus is very old, with rusting, almost communist-esque buildings, and pleasant, verdant foliage spilling down into the (long ago) paved streets. The Law buildings are roughly 5 years old, and serve as a stark contrast to the economics buildings, which might be the oldest. I kind of like it, it's different from any campus I've ever been to.
There were a decent amount of foreign students, although all were from Asia (so far 3 Chinese, 1 Indonesian), and EVERYONE seemed to be new to meeting Japanese speakers of the Caucasian variety. I tried out a little bit of mandarin with the Chinese students, which was a nice chance to get the cobwebs out.
Yesterday I went to find an apartment with Hashimoto and my tutor, a 3rd year Economics PhD candidate named Hara. We chatted with the real estate agents for a while, and finally went to 3 different places that fit the bill. Unfortunately none of the 3 were perfect. One was extremely new, had free high-speed (光ファイバー, which is faster than almost anything in the states) internet, a loft for visitors, but no view and pretty far from the coin laundry place I'm planning to use. The next one was terrible. The third had an INCREDIBLE view, seemed spacious, was extremely close to the coin laundry place, but I would have to figure out internet access (which can be a pain), and it didn't have a loft. It was a toss up between number 1 and number 3, and I ended up going with number 3. So if anybody visits, they won't get their own personal loft, but they will get a great view and a more central location.
Today I played softball with Hashimoto and a bunch of other grad students, which was embarrassing because I think people expected me to be good and I was not in the least. I think it's been almost 16 years since I seriously played anything close to softball, and although I wasn't terrrrriiiiiiibbbbbbllllleeeee I definitely didn't meet up to the expectations. Afterwards we went to lunch and now I came back to my place.
Classes start in a few weeks, and I move into my apartment in about 5 days. I'm excited to get everything set up so I can start my life over here.
Tootles,
Max
