Tokyo Orientation was absolutely massive, and a pretty awesome (but extremely tiring) experience. Thanks to being in Banshu Ako and therefore theoretically being unable to make it to Shinjuku for the first meeting on Saturday, I was given an extra night in the amazing Keio Plaza hotel on the Friday. Which made Friday a pretty busy day, hehe. I left Oscar's at around 10am and raced back to Ako, where I packed my bag and quickly jumped on the train to Himeji. My poor friend Amanda had recovered from climbing Fuji only to get struck down with appendicitis, so she had been rushed to hospital on the Tuesday. I promised her I'd visit her so I raced out there on the bus and chatted to her for an hour or so. Some of her teachers had come to see her as well, and one of them offered me a lift back to the station when she found out I needed to go to Tokyo. Japanese kindness never ceases to amaze me :)

At the station I quickly grabbed a ticket to Tokyo on the next Nozomi, grabbing dinner at an amazing vending machine restaurant in the meantime. It was some of the best soba and tempuradon I've ever had, which just goes to show, don't underestimate vending machine restaurants! I finally got onto the train and spent most of the time reading a very interesting book on body language (check it out - Body Language by Julius Fast). I got in to Shinagawa at around 10:30 (it takes almost exactly 3 hours to get there from Himeji ... pretty amazing!) and was in Shinjuku by just before 11. I got a little lost but eventually found my bearings and got to the hotel. I was going to go out and explore but was really tired from being crazy busy lately, so I decided an early night would be a good idea.

I woke up at around 7am when my room mate, a friendly guy called William who is the president of Tottori AJET this year, wandered in from a party, haha. He had some friends who were doing a hotel room party somewhere - talk about the Tokyo lifestyle :P Crazy, action packed and no breaks, not even for sleep, haha. I went down to grab a cheeky late breakfast before the orientation orientation meeting started. It was a pretty good day - really laid back. We packed some welcome bags, found out what our duties were and generally knocked the orientation out of the park :) At night I headed out for dinner with my friend Brandon, and we ended up at a really nice izakaya. It wasn't so nice when the bill came and we were up for $45 each, but we'd been rather overpaid for our travel expenses so we didn't particularly mind.

From there it was out to a hotel at Narita airport to prepare for the arrival of the JETs the next day. I had to get up ridiculously early as I was meeting the very first plane of JETs (from Australia) that was scheduled to arrive at just before 7am. Thanks to only getting to the hotel after 10pm and then having things to do until after midnight, I didn't get much sleep - maybe 5 hours. Thankfully the excitement of the new JETs arriving and a cheeky coffee snagged from Starbucks at the airport the instant it opened, I was ok though. After a strangely tense wait, we finally got to jump and cavort around as the very first 2008/09 JETs entered the country! Although they were from Australia and hence had no jet lag, they had come up on the night flight so most of them were pretty tired. We tried to genk them up as much as we could, and finally got them all safely onto the buses and on the way to Shinjuku.

I was lucky enough to be a bus leader, so I was in charge of one of the buses. It was really good fun as I got to play tour guide and tell the group all of the things they needed to know about orientation as we travelled to the hotel. And I have to admit, it was awesome to be with a big group Australians - their accents were music to my ears :D Thanks to being so tired they were a bit of a tough crowd, but I didn't take it personally. It was kind of like teaching some of my classes actually, haha. I tried to keep everything short so they could sleep and read their orientation books, and then I wandered up and down talking to everyone and getting their story, where they were going in Japan and taking any questions they had.

We arrived at the hotel just before 10am, and I jumped in to help out with various things throughout the hotel. About 11:30 I went for a Starbucks run and in the afternoon I managed to sneak in a bit of time for a nap. I didn't manage to sleep but just lying down and taking it easy really helped. I had a Hospitality Centre shift from 6 - 8 which wasn't ideal, but it could have been much worse. After that I went out for dinner with a couple of the new JETs, introducing them to their first izakaya and Japanese cultural experiences. It was funny to watch their awestruck faces as I explained to them about taking their shoes off etc, and as I ordered in Japanese and helped them to order in Japanese too.

After dinner I went out with Brandon to check out Kabuki-cho, the 'dodgiest' place in Japan. It was good fun as naturally, we're not dumb tourists wandering around just waiting to be dragged into a yakuza snack bar trap. We kept to clean places (like the crazy izakaya very appropriately called 'Mysterious') before calling it a night just after midnight. Back at the hotel, Brandon pulled out his DS so we ended up playing multiplayer games until much later than we should have, haha. It was awesome fun, beating the crap out of each other in New Super Mario Brothers.

Monday was the real start of orientation, at the lovely hour of 8:30am. Brandon and I ran the prefectural meeting for Hyogo, which basically consisted of shouting over the top of everyone else to try to make sure everyone was there, give them their school information and then tell them what they needed to do at orientation. After that we were free for the day, so we wandered around Shinjuku for lunch and then did some printing for the Hyogo AJET Welcome Packs at a convenient Fedex Kinkos. The staff bordered on assholes, surprisingly, but we got there in the end.

Back at the hotel I had another hospitality centre shift from 4 to 6 and then the Welcome Reception from 6:30pm. That went really well and I got to chat to some of the new Hyogo JETs in more depth. We continued this on to the Hyogo AJET Night Out at the Watami izakaya closest to the hotel. Hokkaido was there too, and between us, we booked out nearly an entire floor, haha. I also bumped into Vanessa, one of the few Perth JETs who didn't get placed in Hyogo. I hadn't seen her for almost a year so it was great to catch up. Unfortunately I had to call it a night very early as I had a 6am shift on the hospitality centre the next day.

Getting up at 5am after another relatively late night and a couple of nights of bad sleep wasn't particularly enjoyable, but I fought through it and got through my shift in genki style. I was on with interesting people, too, which made the time fly by. After we'd finished our shift, I went for breakfast with them and we had a good chat. I wasn't required until the early afternoon, so I went to sleep again and woke up feeling marginally better. We had our prefectural meeting where I met Oouchi-sensei again, and he let us hand out our Hyogo AJET Welcome Packs. He's really pro-HAJET for some reason, which really helps a lot.

After that I played games with Brandon until it was time for the final helpers meeting at around 5pm. Many of us were heading to embassies, so we went downstairs to prepare for that. There wasn't a bad turnout for the Australian embassy event, which was encouraging. The event was identical to last year, featuring boring speeches, a plea to help sell Australian education and then some mediocre food :P Still, never look a gift horse in the mouth, right? When we came out of the embassy, to our surprise there was an enormous storm going on outside. As we ran to the subway a giant flash of lightning actually blinded me and from the fact the thunder came almost at the same time, I realised it was far too close for comfort - probably about 300 metres away. Needless to say we ran like hell underground, haha.

Back at the hotel I changed and headed out with Brandon to Kabukicho again. We grabbed some beer and yakitori at a great little place we'd seen the night before, and Brandon insisted on ordering raw horse heart. I tried some, but it didn't do much for me hehe. We were eventually joined by one of the new JETs who had spotted me as he walked by, and he tagged along for the rest of the night. We grabbed one more beer in a club called Tokyo Loose, but it was empty except for a few very skanky looking gaijin, so we left very quickly. Back at the hotel it was another night of DS before finally getting some more inadequate sleep in preparation for the long trip home.

The departure meeting was at 8:45am and we rolled into the buses around 9:30am. At Tokyo station we jumped on the Nozomi and shot down to Shin-Osaka. Brandon and I played more DS on the way - hooray for bluetooth, as we were sitting far apart. The guy behind me on the train must have thought I was insane as I kept turning around to make signs at him whenever I killed him or vice versa. Around noon we cruised into Shin-Osaka and had a little bit of time to do some shopping before getting on the final buses to take us to the Yashiro Training Centre. Here the same whirlwind that hit me last year happened again this year, with the kids being rushed to the meeting room and almost immediately spirited away by their teachers.

I was a bit stuck once I got to Yashiro, as I didn't have a teacher coming to pick me up and there were no Ako JETs. Thankfully, Oouchi-sensei had my back and sent me packing with a Himeji JET. It was a slightly awkward situation as I didn't want to intrude on the JET getting to know his teachers, so I just stayed quiet. We finally got to Himeji and they very kindly dropped me off at the train station, and I jetted home to collapse into a sleep of much exhaustion :P

Overall, I felt kinda proud of the new group, I have to say. Sounds a bit silly, but as a helper, they were absolutely awesome to help. The Hyogo bunch was extremely impressive, in particular - they struck me as really enthusiastic, intelligent and mature. I'm looking forward to seeing more of them at HAJET events this year and continuing to help them out.