We live in Japan now!

Konnichiwa! We arrived safely in Japan early last Sunday morning with the rest of the Aussie JETs (Japanese Exchange Teachers) giving us the whole day to explore Tokyo! This was Tom's first time in Japan so with no itinerary we hit the streets doing whatever took our fancy.

First stop was a coffee shop to get some iced coffee after the long overnight flight. The interaction (or lack there of) we had with the waitress was evidence that we need to learn some Japanese quick smart! Second stop was a sushi restaurant so we could try some real Japanese sushi. Did you know that sushi in Japan isn't like the handrolls we have in Australia? Instead, Japanese nigiri sushi are bite sized, cylindrical shaped balls of rice with an individual piece of sashimi layered on top. To eat it, you should use your fingers or chopsticks to turn the piece of sushi upside down so that the soy sauce only touches the fish and not the rice before putting the whole thing in your mouth! So far this is proving difficult, but we're pushing through these hard times making sure we give ourselves plenty of opportunities to learn this integral new skill, as inelegant as we appear to everyone around us!

We stumbled across a J-Town anime/manga exhibition with one of our Canberra JET friends. There were heaps of displays, games and fun photo opportunities from animes such as Dragon Ball Z, One Piece and Naruto. A few of the photos have been posted below.

Can anybody work out what Tom's doing wrong in the photo above?

Monday and Tuesday were spent in JET conferences all day where we learnt how to be good Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs)! We had networking events on both nights where dinner and alcohol were provided. Unsurprisingly, this degenerated into a group of Aussies, Americans and Jamaicans going out and doing karaoke on both occassions! On the first night we got to meet and hang out with our fellow Gifu JETs (collectively we're known as Geefs). They all seem really cool and we can't wait to spend the next year or 2 going to matsuri (Japanese festivals), exploring our region and hanging out with these guys! We're also all a really good bunch of singers (well, we think we are and that's all that matters) so bring on more karaoke!!

The second night we were invited to the Australian Embassy which had a beautiful garden where we were served drinks and we were lucky enough to meet the Australian Ambassador for Japan, whose name happens to be His Excellency, Bruce! Bruce told us all about how the Embassy will look after us if something goes wrong in Japan (please contact them if you haven't heard from us for a few months), how to be ambassadors for Australia in Japan, and even offered to supply us with Australian paraphernalia kits including Kanga-cup kits!

We've now arrived in Gifu, met our supervisors and principals (all in very limited English and Japanese), moved into our apartment, and are just starting to fend for ourselves (still in a very supported way though). 

Stay tuned because next post we'll put some photos up of our apartment and introduce you to our new home town, Gifu city!  

Sarah and Tom