Japan Day 1

Just got back from a week in Japan doing training for work. The flight over wasn't too bad. I got stuck in the window seat, which on such a long flight is not my first choice. But luckily the woman in the middle seat ended up moving shortly after take-off, so at least I got to stretch out a little bit. This was actually the first time I took Continental over instead of NWA, and I have to say it was much nicer. I've had bad experiences with NWA flight attendants being unpleasant on overseas flights. Plus Continental has the mini TV screens on the back of each seat so you can watch movies and play games. On the flight over they had over 300 movies you could watch! Talk about keeping yourself occupied.

After the 15 hour flight it took another 3 hours to actually get to the hotel. With all the people that are crowded on the trains in Japan on an almost regular basis dragging luggage through the train system is not fun. But I made it to the "usual" hotel in one piece. The hotel chain is called Hotel Mets and they're known for their convenience since they're always situated right next to the train station. Definitely makes getting to work a little bit easier. Here are some pictures of the room. Tiny compared to most U.S. hotels, but not too bad considering you're mostly just sleeping when you're there. The only bad thing this time is that i got stuck in a smoking room. Blech...
And you can't have a Japanese bathroom without the fancy toilet, fully loaded with seat warming and bidet.

This is the view of the train station from my window.

I had a bigger class than normal this time - 13 people, as opposed to the usual 6 to 8. But they were much more talkative and willing to ask questions. Normally I get a room of blank and sleepy faces with no idea if they're actually understanding my Japanese.

After class I stopped by my company's new branch office in Japan. Right now there's only 4 people actually working out of this office, but it seems like things are getting setup pretty nicely considering they only moved into the office a couple weeks ago.

This is the office as seen from the far corner. You can see one of the small pods that seats 3 people, with the door to the bathroom in the back.

This is Chiaki, the newest member to the Japan team, standing next to her seat in the row of desks next to the 3 seater pod. And behind the divider is...

A long row of seats and a giant monitor for holding training classes, presentations, etc. Hopefully if the classes are small enough this is where I'll be doing training next time. Then the door to the office is in the far back left corner, and that's pretty much the entire office...nice and cozy ^__^

There were even some nice flower arrangements that were sent as welcoming gifts from some of our partner companies in Japan. So Asian! I guess Taiwanese people aren't the only ones that like putting these flower arrangements in their offices.
Once I made my visit to the office I went out to dinner with 2 coworkers to a place called Hanzou. They served lots of small dishes from noodles and deep fried pork cutlets to onigiri. It was quite tasty and had a very interesting atmosphere.

To start off with the entire restaurant is underground...so all the windows in the restaurant were fake, which was kind of funny for some reason.

Once you enter the restaurant the decor is very earthy, and there are these little rooms off to each side. Almost like little mud dwellings...

They had enclosed rooms like this one.

But they also had more open wooden seating which is where we sat. Here are my coworkers getting ready to eat.