Follow-up and Initial Impressions

So far, things haven't been quite as alien as I thought they might be. There are still a lot of differences from home, but a lot of things aren't as different as I'd feared. The entire public transit system has everything written in English as well as Japanese, which is going to make finding things way easier. A lot of the really different cultural things so far are things I expected, or at least certainly don't surprise me. There are a lot more bright colourful signs and cute cartoon animal logos (mostly bears/pandas so far, although the Nova pink bunny seems to be showing up quite a bit as well), the different style vending machines everywhere, the techiness and organization of everything, etc.
I used one of the public washrooms at the Kansai Airport, and it was so neat. The toilet had something like 15 buttons on it (including multiple strengths of bidet, "shower", different seat heat settings, 3 different volumes of flush sound, and so on), all the soap and faucets were run by motion sensor, which I know we have in Canada some places, but they're still neat. The unit to dry your hands was like a box that you stick your hands in, and it glows red and blasts them from both sides like a jet engine, cleaning them far better the oldschool ones I'm used to.
I was alone with this other new student named Fionna getting on the bullet train, and we almost got on the wrong section because we didn't really know what we were doing. They have different train cars for reserved and unreserved seating, and the unreserved cars were 1-3, so we just ran until we got to 3 and managed to get on before it took off on us. Shortly after, we discovered that 3 was the smoking car, which was about 98% male, and did indeed have considerable amounts of smoke wafting around. There was a Japanese guy a few seats away that was flipping through some porn magazine, which I found funny.
A few of the Nova staff met us at the train station in Hiroshima and took us by street-car to our place. This apartment is the main residence for Nova staff, and has probably 15-20 teachers living in it. Despite what I said last night about getting ready for bed, I ended up staying up for considerably longer, because a bunch of other people from both our building and other nearby people came by and we had some drinks. Everybody seems friendly, and it was a good chance to get to meet a lot of the people around. I'm going to be working in the Diamond City Hiroshima school, which is one of the smaller ones, and probably the furthest away in Hiroshima, but one of my room mates works there, and Fionna is going to be working there as well. Supposedly where we live is a really central location though. I'm a 10 minute walk from both the peace park and A-bomb memorial, and there seems to be tons of shopping and food close by. Today I'm going to go try registering as a Japanese resident (which is in a building just across the street), and then just wandering around and checking out the park - I'll take some pictures! One of the people I met last night who is moving out soon has offered to show me around tomorrow, so hopefully that will help for figuring out where everything is. My luggage delivery is supposed to show up 8-9pm today, so I need to make sure I'm back then, but otherwise I've got free time until Monday when my 3 day training begins.
I have my work schedule now, and will be working Sunday 10am-5:20pm, Monday 1:20pm - 5:40pm, Tuesday 1:20pm-9:00pm, Wednesday/Thursday off, Friday 1:20pm-9:00pm, Saturday 10:00am - 5:40pm. Anyway, last time I ate was on the plane from San Francisco, so I'm going to go wander about and see if I can find somewhere to buy food.
-Richard