Recap: JPDO and Tokyo

A week ago, I had just finished school. Now I am in Tokyo and it feels like it's been about a month instead of a week.
The three-ish days in Berkeley for orientation were pretty great, except for the weather. June in San Fransisco seriously feels like November in Texas, and I'm not even exaggerating. But it was canceled out by the fact that San Francisco is the prettiest city ever. The houses are all sorts of pastel colors and they're all close together and up on the hillsides like stairs and there so much GREEN! The first thing we saw when we got out of the airport were rolling green hills on one side and the bay on the other side. And Berkeley isn't bad either. We could see the Golden Gate Bridge from the dorms!

The plane flight was pretty uneventful. I saw four new movies; "Alice in Wonderland" (okay), "How to Train Your Dragon" (loved it), some movie about Tolstoy (sad and confusing), and "Leap Year" (major chick flick, but cute). And while on the plane I'm pretty sure there was some sort of time warp. We left San Francisco at around noon on June 9th and arrived in Japan at 2:30 on June 10th, but there was no nighttime. I'm not sure when it changed from Jun 9th to June 10th, but I'm a little sad that I missed the night of June 9th, 2010. I never know what could have happened!

We got into Narita and were greeted by a giant hot dog, and then we drove for about an hour past rice paddies, a hotel called the Rainbow Hotel, and Tokyo Disney.





Everything is amazing here. Even the construction equipment is colorful!



And the toilets? Just like everyone says they are. The button are pretty self explanatory, but we still decided to experiment with them yesterday evening. The wall got a little bit wet.

We went to the U.S. Embassy today to thank the people who gave us our scholarships, and then we went to a museum that had all sorts of Edo exhibits. We ran into about five school groups (mostly elementary school, but one high school) and they were SO CUTE. We're staying in a really nice hotel in Tokyo with an awesome view:


(Those big buildings are the Tokyo Metropolitan Buildings, big government buildings)

I get to ride the bullet train to Nagoya tomorrow and meet my host family!