What a long day…our flight left San Francisco at around 2 pm on Monday but because we crossed the International Date Line, we virtually lost a day and arrived at Narita Airport at around 5 pm on Tuesday. The total flight time was around 9 hours which wasn’t too bad. Watching the movies helped passed the time and I attempted to brush up on some key Japanese phrases in my guidebook ("Doko des ka chikatetsu?"...Where is the subway?...). After getting off the plane, I was impressed with the number of JFMF (Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund) workers holding signs at just about every corner to make sure we didn’t get lost on our way to the chartered buses. We still had a 1 ½ hour drive to the hotel in Tokyo. I could barely keep my eyes open.
As soon as we arrived at the hotel, we were broken into small groups of 3-4 and assigned to a Japanese college student (our dinner host and city guide for the evening), Sayaka Shimazu, who took us out to eat on our first night in Japan. It was such a good idea and I’m glad that my first subway ride was supervised by someone who knew what they were doing. Just looking at the map of the Tokyo Metro is daunting. We ended up eating at a restaurant in Ginza, a couple stops away from our hotel. Ginza is a trendy upscale district…reminding me of NYC except that it is litter-free and there is a noticeable absence of car horns. The restaurant, Komachitei, was empty except for the four of us and a group of very loud businessmen. We sampled pumpkin tofu, sashimi, spring rolls, and boiled potato and carrots…all very good.
Our host for the evening was currently attending Showa Women’s University. She was so sweet and insisted on keeping a list of things we had questions about promising to e-mail us back with the info. Sayaka talked about her retired grandparents who spent time golfing, shared her English textbooks with us, said that soccer was equally if not more popular than baseball, and recommended the Japanese band Exile. She was very interested in what we ate back home, our hobbies, and the movies we watched. She said she loves Beyonce and Christina Aguilera but dislikes Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. I noticed her cell phone was very cute, full of dangling charms, and she had a picture of the Chinese actress Zhang Ziyi (from Memoirs of a Geisha) on her screensaver. The other 2 teachers in our dinner group were from Florida and Kentucky—an art teacher and an elementary teacher. We were all equally exhausted from our elongated day of travel and felt awful declining Sayaka’s invitation to walk around the city. By this time, it was 11 pm and we just couldn’t stay up any longer. On our way back to the hotel, I was shocked not only at how busy the streets were so late on a weeknight but by the many businessmen we saw on the subway ride home. Another interesting observation—a “women only” sign on the subway platform...wonder why that is necessary…After a short detour (we missed our stop because we were chatting), we convinced Sayaka that we could find our way back and she headed home. Thank goodness for the Tokyo Tower (which stands right behind our hotel)…a nice and tall landmark you can’t miss.
I have to mention an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher from Ohio I met at the San Francisco airport before we left for Tokyo. Apparently, she had scanned the list of 200 teachers on the trip and scoped out the teachers with Chinese names. She spotted me at the airport (hard to miss with our name tags) and we chatted for a while. She has led a fascinating life. Before becoming an elementary school ESL teacher, she taught at a university in Beijing and then taught Chinese literature at Cornell University and UC-Davis. She was so sweet and hilarious and reminded me of my own mother. She even spoke some Chinese with me...and I could understand most of it. Her teenage son and daughter are ABCs (American-Born Chinese) just like me. In our conversation, I discovered that she had left China in 1988, just before Tiananmen Square. It turns out that she had some connections to the student leaders. More on her thoughts about the student democracy movement later in the semester…
No comments:
Post a Comment