Good Luck To Us!

Ohayo gozaimasu! We made it to Japan and are finally relaxing a little bit. The week leading up to the trip was so crazy with trying to cram in last visits and good byes. We are going to miss everyone, but I'm sure the year will fly by.

So- that was the lead up to saying that we actually enjoyed the 14hr flight! It went really smoothly and we were able to relax. Also, they gave us a surprising amount of food, which included one excellent gourmet brownie. When we arrived in Osaka and got through customs, Yoko(our coordinator), and an another school board person were right there with a big colorful sign. We hurried to catch a train and took it through Kyoto and Otsu to Kusatsu, where we stayed in a hotel for the night. It was a nice hotel and we slept really well that night. The next morning we woke up super early and had green tea in our room before going down to breakfast. The buffet had both Japanese(rice and fish) and more western stuff(eggs, bread, meat). We ate both. Yoko met us later and brought us here to our house in Ritto. Ritto seems to be around the size of Ann Arbor, maybe smaller because it ends at the mountains and doesn't sprawl like towns in the US seem to do. After she showed us around our house(very cool and very big), she took us shopping which is a 5-10 minute walk into town. We bought some groceries to get us started and she showed us where everything we might need will be. We took a break for lunch and then she came back on her bike. We followed her on the house bikes(there were conveniently two here already, so we didn't have to buy them) on the routes to the three schools we will be working at. One is super close and the others are around 20 minutes on bikes. We found out that we will be at separate schools and rotate through each one every four weeks or so. For Dinner Yoko brought her husband over and we walked about a block down the street to the Yakitori restaurant. They let us pick the type of food and we picked that because we thought it was safe- we were wrong. It was good, but I thought Yakitori was just chicken skewers. They ordered us tons of different stuff: chicken insides, chicken skin, chicken cartilage, ground chicken(like little chicken meatballs), chicken with plum sauce, regular chicken, eggplant, and mushrooms. Everything was grilled on skewers except a special treat that the chef brought out for us on the house. It was the little meatball ones but they were raw! I think Yoko and her husband felt obligated to eat them(it was their first time too) but I told them that raw chicken was kind of against our whole belief system. We had beer and did the Kanpai cheers thing- It was really fun. My favorite Yakitori was the cooked chicken meatball things. For the record we definately could not have gone there without them. All we would have been able to order was the beer. There was some English in Osaka and Kusatsu, but not in Ritto. Good luck to us!

Today is a free day for us so I will take pictures of our palace and post them soon. This is very fun but crazy!