School Jane to went apple monkey carburetor.

Hi-diddly-oh! I made it to Nagasaki safe and sound last night. I've now been in the city officially for one whole day, all by myself, and I'm loving every minute of it.

I'm not implying I got here solely by my own efforts. Urata-sensei made the hotel and airline reservations for me, printed out maps to the hotel from the airport, and photocopied the Tsushima bus schedule for me. All I really wound up having to do was stand at the place he pointed out to me at the appropriate time. Foolproof, right?

For those of you who don't know, the Japanese drive on the wr... opposite side of the road. Opposite from Americans and, to the best of my knowledge, roughly 95% of the world. The only countries I can think of who do it this way are Japan and the UK. Even with all the pluralism and cultural relativism I soaked up from my anthro classes, I still occasionally slip, like I just did. It's just that the.... forget it.

I packed my bags and headed to the prescribed point on the map: the bus stop, right in front of my apartment. I got there about twenty minutes early, just in case. As I stood there, I decided to read the posted schedule, to try out my fledgling kanji literacy. I couldn't find the time for my bus--in fact, I couldn't find times for any buses heading to the airport. (I spent the past two weeks drilling myself on the kanji for airport, airplane, and other catching-bus-to-airport-related characters.) I didn't panic; rather, I just sort of stood there, slowly getting frustrated with the whole bus system, which must have made a misprint in their schedule.

While I was silently fuming about it, one of the teachers who sits in my row in the faculty room pulled in to the apartment complex. About ten or fifteen of the teachers live around the same complex as mine, by the way. She got out and greeted me, startled like everyone is when I greeted her in Japanese. (I swear, I'm not using any more Japanese than you learn in two weeks of an intro course, yet they all chitter "ee?!" and "jozu ne!" and "sugoi!" whenever I thank them or tell them good morning. It's cute, but confusing.) I decided to admit I was lost, and asked her where she thought the bus stop was. It almost came out entirely in Japanese--this got another warm "ee?!" out of her--and she thought about it for a few seconds, and pointed to what she thought was the right stop.

The right stop was directly across the street.

I thanked her kindly, picked up my bag, and dashed across the street. There, on the schedule, was the time I was expecting, and along came the bus, right on time. All this confusion because I got the traffic flow mixed up.

Anyway, from there we got to the airport right on time. I paid for the ticket at the counter--about $200 round-trip, but since this is a business trip, it's all on the school's dime--checked my bag, and caught my flight without any problem.

Flying from Tsushima to Nagasaki is kind of amusing. First of all, you're in a tiny little 40-seat prop job, which sort of wobbles as it takes off. The wobbling is actually due to all the wind that the island gets, but it doesn't make the plane look any less silly. Secondly, the entire trip, from runway to runway, is about 35 minutes. You ascend, the little seatbelt sign turns off, you have just enough time to go pee, and then the seatbelt sign gets turned back on, because you start the descent. $100 for 35 minutes in the air.

Anyway, the guy next to me started talking to me in you-must-not-be-from-here-speed Japanese, so I thankfully was able to keep up with him. He asked if I was a teacher in Tsushima, and we started talking from there. His full name is Kan Da, or his last name is Kanda--I think it's the latter, because I haven't heard of many monosyllabic Japanese names. Regardless, he teaches at one of the local junior high schools, and his school's JET this past year was an Irish guy I don't think I met. He asked if I knew how to get to my hotel, and while I had a rough outline of the plan written down courtesy of Urata-sensei, I figured it couldn't hurt, and asked him if he knew which bus I should take. He said sure, and left it at that.

Thanks to staring at Google maps of Japan for the last week or two, I learned that you don't really fly into Nagasaki proper. The nearest airport is Omura, which is about a 40-minute bus ride to the northeastish. Anyway, we landed, grabbed our bags, and he walked me past the bus I needed to take, to the ticket vending machine, talked me through everything, and pointed out the bus to me again.

On the bus, I sat next to a Japanese man dressed in a suit and listening to an MP3 player. After about ten minutes on the bus, he asked me something that I assumed was Japanese. When I asked him to repeat it, he said "Shall I talk?"

I've been here about a month now, and one of the peculiarities I've noticed about Japanese English is the frequent use of "shall." I don't know if it's just from growing up in the southeast, but nobody I know uses "shall" in daily speech. It feels to me like it's very rarely used outside of formal situations--"shall we?" is about all that comes to mind, and even there it's used to sounds sort of mock-formal. Again, maybe it's just my experience, but it sounds archaic to me, and yet I've heard it at least once a day from a Japanese since I've been here.

Anyway. Guy in a suit asked me "shall I talk?" I grinned and said sure. He asked me if I'm in Nagasaki for holiday; I told him it's a little of both. He asked where I came from; I told him Georgia, and had to specify America. He asked if Japan is too hot for me; I laughed and explained that Georgia's pretty humid too. At about the same time, we both sort of realized that all of that was in Japanese--what I mean is, I was carrying on with him in Japanese for all of that. It wasn't native speed, mind you, and I was using stilted dictionary forms. (Probably the English equivalent of something like "Well, you see, I am here today on holiday, but it is the case that the day after tomorrow I have a meeting. I am a teacher because.", with the "because" tacked on in the wrong place--it should have been explaining why I had a meeting. He apparently understood what I was trying to say. The point is, it probably came out overly proper, not very relaxed at all.) We talked for the rest of the trip, and he asked if I knew where I was staying. I eventually had to break out of Japanese, for lack of vocabulary, and I learned that his English was very impressive. I told him where my hotel was, but I was still a little iffy on where exactly my stop was. He offered to help me, which I found out entailed him skipping his stop to get off at mine. He walked me to the hotel, talking to me all the way, jumping back and forth between English and Japanese. He even walked me into the hotel lobby, just to make sure I got there safe and sound. Great guy.

So yeah. Check-in was uneventful, except that I had to pay up-front. It comes out to about $50 a night, which seems outrageously cheap to me, seeing as I'm right on the Nagasaki waterfront, and--which is more--I'm right next to the convention center where we're having our meeting on Monday and Tuesday. The school's paying for my stay, but only for the nights I have to be here--my first two nights are on my dime. Anyway, I paid the money, and they gave me my room key. It's a real key, not a fancy card key or retinal imprint device or anything. Comes on a keychain complete with a hefty lump of metal that reminds me of a Pog slammer, with the room number etched onto it, as well as a little orange stick that I paid no attention to.

The elevator reminds me of some of the ones in eastern Europe--not dangerous, just tiny. I got off at my floor, opened the door, and immediately went to inspect the room. Y'know, check for bugs, make sure everything's clean, pull down the bedding to see that it's been changed, all the stuff your mom did when you went on family vacations and stopped in hotels for the night. ...Everyone's mom did that, right? Right?

So I open the door, and flip the nearest switch I can find, and nothing turns on. The only light in the room is a 1" square LED with the word "IN" written above it. This caught me completely offguard, and I stared at it for about thirty seconds before I realized I was holding the door open with my foot, and anybody walking around would be able to see the gaijin gawking at the light switch. Before I could close the door, though, the bellboy from the lobby walked by, and casually pointed out, in broken English, that the stick on my key goes in. That's all he said, and he stood there while I put the rest of it together--above the "IN" was a little hole covered by a little door which, sure enough, fit the stick on my keychain perfectly. Once the little stick is in, all the lights in the room work. I thanked him, he very graciously shrugged it off, and I swear I heard a snicker as he rounded the hall.

So there you have it. I got outsmarted by an electrical outlet. Japanese utilities 3, Adam 0.

There'll be pictures up of all that I'm talking about--honest--but I left my camera-computer hookup cord thing back on Tsushima. I also left my internet cable at home, assuming this hotel would provide one, like Keio did in Tokyo. I had to buy one at an electronics store today. Guess how much? Jeremy, if you're reading this, guess. No, really, guess. $4 for a 7-foot CATV cable. Best Buy would charge that much per foot, right?

That's enough for one post. That, and I'm about to pass out. It was a long, long day, full of swashbuckling, donuts, sweat, and nougat. No, seriously, my day included all of those things. You'll just have to wait till my next post to hear about it. Hah! It's sort of like a cliffhanger, if a story with three readers can have cliffhangers.

Oh well. The title comes from an awesome Japanese page Madeline showed me a couple of years ago, by the way. Nighty night!