Hello from Japan!

I boarded the flight to Tokyo in Chicago. Here's a nice picture of Chicago that I took from the plane. The plane was fairly full, and unfortunately I had someone sitting next to me. She was a young American woman who was on her way back to Taipei. At first she was quite chatty, which I found alarming at the start of a 12-hour flight, but she stopped talking after a while (see the reference to "Talkative Airplane Seatmate" defined as the lowest level of companionship in the posting on "Aunt Gretchen's Visit"). She was also a little on the chubby side, but fortunately not so much as to intrude into my seat. It was also annoying that the person in front of me put his seat all the way back at the beginning of the flight and left it that way for the next twelve hours. The flight was extremely long and boring. It was interesting because, since we just kept going west, it was light the whole time. It was also interesting because it was almost all over land, going over northern Canada, Alsaka (I think I flew right over Rachel's head in Fairbanks) and then down along the coast of Siberia for the last few hours. You wouldn't think that going to Japan would involve mostly flying over land. I watched pretty much everything available in the way of entertainment, which there wasn't much of. I did learn to enjoy "Ugly Betty" and "Everyone Hates Chris". We had two bad meals of chicken with rice and glop; plain glop in one case and curry glop in the second case. I was kind of hoping for sushi, but there were only a couple of small sushi rolls on the side accompanying the first glop. We also had a snack of a dried up roll with ham and cheese on it. The airport in Tokyo is nice, with plenty of English signs. It took me awhile to figure out the ATM machines. They wouldn't give me any money. I finally figured out that the problem was that I was asking for 300,000 yen, which I thought was $300, but it was really $3000. I also encountered the traditional squatter toilet. Thank goodness Rachel had prepared me for that with her wise advice. I did notice, after it was too late, that the bathroom also provided plenty of Western toilets. I guess the squatter was just provided for the older, more traditional, Japanese lady who doesn't believe in new-fangled gadgets. I managed to get on the correct bus to Tsujido station, where I was met by my colleage Kazuyuki. He took me to a nice casual Japanese student hangout where I had an enormous pile of sashimi, with miso soup and rice. The sashimi was fine, although it wasn't any better than what you get in America. It was, however, much bigger and much cheaper than what you get in America. Kazuyuki is famous for his work ethic, and I was afraid he was going to make me do some work after dinner (this was about 10 p.m. after being up for 24 hours or so) but he took me back to the guest house. Well, he did try to get me to take a walking tour of Keio University, but I told him I was too tired. Kazuyuki had done a lot of work on our workshop, so I gave him a t-shirt that registers wi-fi signals, and I think he was very impressed. Today I got up at 8:00 for breakfast, which was a croissant and something like a dinner roll, like a French style of breakfast. Luckily I had brought an "oatmeal to go", which I ate for "second breakfast". Then I went back to sleep. I almost had a crisis when I tried to take a shower and the water wouldn't get hot. I had already given up and washed my hair with cold water when I realized there was a separate switch for the hot water heater. There was a thermostat on the water faucet going up to 50 degrees C. I don't know how hot that is in F, but I do know it's really, really hot. I turned the temperature down to 30, and it was still really hot. Well, that's about it for now. It's really warm here. It feels like it's well over 70. All the clothes I brought are too warm. Maybe I can find a souvenir t-shrt.