JET Orientation

During the Orientation, we were put up in the Keio Plaza Hotel which is a very nice hotel. Seemed quite upclass but I was told that it was not a 5 star hotel - which I found incredibly hard to be believe.
It was full of official events with speeches and training sessions.

Some of the speeches were quite interesting in fact, with some of the speakers making heaps of jokes. They probably understand that we were all very tired and out attention span was quite short. In the evening they gave us a really nice buffet dinner. It must have cost them quite a bit as it was really good stuff.

These people seemed to be quite important…. I don’t know who they are as I arrived late.

After that was all done and over with, we had our Prefectural Night out organised by the Fukushima JET association. Similar groups in other prefectures were doing similar things at the same time. Since everyone were to meet in the lobby, groups of people were holding out sheets of paper with their prefecture’s name on it and waving it around. It seems that the chaps at FuJET seemed like they knew what they were doing as shown below

We all went to an izakaya (bar) which had a 2 hour nomihoudai (all you can drink) session for just 2500 yen. It was a really busy place, filled with very noisy locals some of which decided to join us.

We all had a really fun time, it was a great opportunity to get to know the other JETs who were placed close to me. Though, it was kinda hard talking to them as it was so very loud. Yes, those locals who are generally reserved just let loose at the izakaya. You see them skulling bottles of beer, screaming and just barfing up (obviously from too much drinking). Speaking of which, the toilet had a bowl which people could throw up in…. and for the sake of brevity, I’ll just supply the link to it here .

After 2 hours of drinking we felt that it was not enough, so we went back to shinjuku and went to a karaoke parlour. You can really see at the skills of some people come out at karaoke, for instance this guy here knew quite a few Japanese songs.

LoL at red eyed Moody in the background. He’s the FuJET president and he’s from Wonga Park which is out past Ringwood. He’s quite the character and a top bloke to talk to. It’s amusing when us Aussie JETs just huddle together throwing slang at each other to the puzzled faces of the American on lookers. At first he was in full on caretaker mode…. but he soon let loose. God know what he wanted to do here:

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