This year was quite different. As soon as I got off the train at Chiba I turned around and saw Jennifer exiting the ticket gates. Jennifer was the CIR I became closest with during last year’s orientation. She is a 2nd year CIR, 4th year JET, from New Zealand. I was really excited to see her and it was really just amazing timing that we were on the same train and ran into each other immediately. She had thought that I had not re-contracted because of posts on my facebook wall about me visiting America over the summer. She was happy to see me and we ended up spending pretty much the entire conference hanging out, except when we were in different lectures.
We went to check in to our hotels. Thankfully I had changed my reservation last Friday. Originally I had played it safe and made a reservation at a hotel well known by foreigners. I was nervous about being able to find a good hotel and didn’t really know how to search for hotels. However, on Friday, as I was organizing my papers for the trip, I realized that I had made a reservation for a hotel that was several train stops away from the location of the conference. On top of that, the hotel was a 15 minute TAXI ride from the nearest train station. I was able to switch my reservation at the last minute with no extra cost, and that turned out to be an awesome idea….as Ian found out (see below).
So I checked in to the Green Tower Makuhari Hotel and then walked over to the conference location. We started off much like last year, with all of us in a giant room. There are several hundred CIRs so it is pretty impressive to see all of us together. Then the made some announcements and started the keynote speech. It was so much better than last years. I barely remember anything about last year’s except that it made my head hurt, and that there was something about glass and a fish. They made us discuss things and I had no idea what to say. This year I understood the speaker and actually felt like the speech could help me. He made us play ice breaker games, like one where we stood facing our partner and we would clap our own hands together one time, then clap in the middle once, and then clap our own hands twice and then once in the middle, and so on. Then they had us try again only without speaking…so we couldn’t count together anymore. Then they made us close our eyes. It was supposed to indicate that there are many ways of communicating without using language and that without language you can still effectively communicate.
He also handed out several cards with different situations on them and had us discuss which ones were “Ok to keep” and which ones “Needed to be changed.” For example one card was about how female students at one school were forced to run 15 km in the field day races while the boys were forced to run 25 km. In my group we had some Chinese and Korean girls, along with another American and a Canadian and it was interesting to hear their opinions.
He gave me some good ideas for ice breakers and other ways to help promote more fulfilling international exchange.
After the speech ended we were done for the day. Ian, the Kyoto Prefecture CIR and Peer Advisor, and I decided to grab dinner since all our friends were busy that night. A lot of CIRs have friends all over the country and were meeting up with their Tokyo friends. We found a small bar/Mexican restaurant near the station that had Guinness on tap so we hit that up. The food was good, but small and there was a massive group of ALTs who were in the area for the Chiba ALT Mid-Year Conference.
It was nice to spend a little time with Ian. We have worked together a few times and hung out in groups before but never one on one.
After that I took a short walk to try to get to know the area but there really wasn’t anything to see. The maps made it look like the bay was super close, and maybe it was, but the path towards it was really dark and even in Japan I don’t want to walk alone. That’s just stupid.
So I headed back to my hotel to watch some TV (thankfully the TV there had CNN to save me from the awfulness that is Japanese TV) and fall asleep.
November 10
The next day was the roughest day of the conference. We had all day lectures lasting an hour and fifteen minutes or an hour and a half each. We had wonderful ones to choose from, such as “Writing Business Emails in Japanese” or “Searching for Trends in the Newspaper” or “How to Communicate Effectively.” None of these turned out to be very helpful. They were all given by professional speakers who knew little to nothing about the CIR position and who basically just babbled at us for their slotted hour and change. Some of them would try to get us to participate but I tried very hard to avoid that. I don’t like speaking Japanese in a room full of other foreigners who speak it better than me.
I basically wound up spending the day with the same group of people: Kyoto CIRs Jonathan and Ian, Jennifer, and Abel who went to Wash U and is placed in Nara. Poor Ian was staying at a hotel like the first one I had reserved. This being Chiba, a lot of people commute to Tokyo in the morning and apparently he had to get crammed onto the trains…literally. The doors would not close and once they closed they couldn’t open. We were able to have a decent time and to be honest the very best part of the whole orientation was that I could compare myself now to myself last year and realize just how far I have come. However, sitting in on the "Prep for JLPT Level 1" lecture proved to me just how far I still have to go.... (T_T)
It was incredible to find that I could make it through an entire day of Japanese speeches without wanting to die. I could actually pay attention and understand what was going on without thinking too hard. That was a really great feeling. It made me feel like I have actually accomplished something over the past year.
At the end of the day Jonathan, Alison, Ian, Jennifer, Abel and I decided to hit up the Outback for dinner. Yeah, that’s right, The Outback. We got steak. Steak steak. Not the fake crap they call steak here, but New York Strip Steak. And bloomin onion. And Cheese Fries! And real Caesar salad and real honey mustard dipping sauce. Oh it was awesome. By the end of it we were all in food comas and could barely move but it was SO worth it. We even ordered a dessert to split between the 6 of us.
They had a BINGO tournament and if you won you would get the whole table’s meal for free…that would have been awesome considering how we each paid about $40. But we lost, and it was worth the money anyway.
After that I was kind of in pain from having eaten so much and we all decided to head back to our hotel rooms.
November 11
The next day actually went by fairly quickly. The first lecture I went to was completely useless but the second one about giving presentations at schools wasn’t bad. It was given by a fellow CIR so he at least understood what it is we do and made it relevant.
Afterward, my group headed into Tokyo to get some lunch and omiyage for our offices. We just grabbed lunch at the first decent place we could find (Tokyo Station is massive and very confusing). Then I grabbed some cookies for the office and some bagels at Bagel & Bagel (not quite the same as home but damn close), hopped on the shinkansen and made my way home. All in all a decent experience.
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