Bugs, jet lag and MTV

Note: This was written the day I got here (June 13th) but I didn't have time to post until today. I really was very tired when I wrote this... I'll write about what's happened since then later on.

Well, I’m here. We’re staying in Narita (right next to the airport) tonight, but we’re getting shipped off tomorrow to a place called Sokendai. I stayed up all night last night (?) so I could sleep on the plane, but I only got a couple hours of sleep, so I’m pretty out of it right now. Plus, for some reason, it was light during the entire flight. We flew along the Alaskan coast and down the other side of the Bering straight, which took 12 hours, and somehow it’s tomorrow but there wasn’t any night. I don’t get it. It seems like we were flying opposite to the path the sun travels so there’d have to be dark, right? Maybe we were far enough north so that there isn’t any night.

Here’s my plane from Madison at 6:00 am. To make things better, I found out this afternoon (night? Next day?) that the other girl from UW Madison flew out on a 8:00 flight to make exactly the same connection I did in Chicago. Oh well. I have a fantastic sunrise picture now. Nyah.

Here's the JAL plane that actually took us to Japan - it's so enormous. There were 10 rows of seats plus two aisles in economy class.

This is when I thought we were starting to fly across the Pacific Ocean:

Too bad the shortest path to Japan isn’t a straight line on the normal map. Oh well, I suppose a practical lesson in spherical geometry isn’t the worst thing in the world.

So right now there’s an enormous waspy-thingy flying around in my room.

There’s no perspective in the picture. I’d hold my hand or something to give you the scale of this enormous monstrosity, but that’d require getting close to it and I think it could bite my finger off. It’s seriously two inches long at least. Luckily, the room doesn’t have curtains – instead there are these panels that slide to block the windows. So now gigantor bug is buzzing around in between the window pane and the panel. It sounds a lot like an electrical short and I keep on thinking it’s my computer’s power adapter about to flip out and fry my computer and all the work and data and papers that’re on it, along with my connection to all ya’ll.

Japanese TV is hilarious. Of course, there’s the obvious hilarity in dubbing Japanese over shows that should have been subtitled for the good of mankind. Take for example, Columbo. It’s Columbo’s voice that makes it any good at all, and the Japanese version sounds suspiciously like Or how about the inflight movie, Big Momma 2? Imagine a black woman, but in Japanese. It doesn’t work. At all. It’s more like a drunken housewife or something.

And MTV. Holy cow, it’s weird. In between each video there a little animation, which is cool, but the animation is just plain on crack. Like one is the MTV logo turning into a swarm of cockroaches and one comes up to the screen and eats it. And then there's the ska band - they've all got pink jackets and are skanking. Or how about the rapping rabbi? He was actually pretty good. I don't think I 'm really doing a very good job of conveying the amazing amount of strangeness here. Maybe I'll take pictures as evidence.

Anyway, I'm here!