I got in yesterday, a shocking hour late, in a bout of drippy fall rain. Quite warm and humid.
The flight itself was … interesting. Far from ideal. Trapped between stench wafting from the open mouthed businesssman to my left, and the headache inducing window glare of sunlight from my right (my neighbor wanted to have the window open, to justify wearing sunglasses for the full 10 hours to Tokyo. Maybe they were her first pair; I was too annoyed to care). As I had finally convinced my brain to slow down and turn off, …I was rudely jerked back to hour three of ten, by a set of steel claws lashing my right arm to the chair. My scared-of-turbulence social worker friend proceeded to reflexively flail for my arm at any dip or bump. I felt too guilty to shake the grasping fingers from my arm, because, well…she was actually shaking. It was inconvenient me, and she apologized for this, but the pressure on my arm stayed constant throughout the exchange.
My only recourse was to reflect on being a superior traveler, and generally more balanced human being.
I contemplated the probability that she’d be an ideal scary movie date, and that maybe people actually do shriek and clutch arms in movies, and mean it. But I’m not a guy. And I don’t like getting grabbed by strangers. Especially when I’m about to drift off into dreamland.
She talked a lot too. Turns out all those folks with nametags were honorees of the JFMF (“I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it? Uh…no.”) aka. Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund. It’s a program that takes US educators and ships them to Japan for 3 weeks of a cultural experience.  (Teachers – hence the middle aged white females). Due to economic hardship on both sides of the Pacific, this will be its final year for a while.
For someone who won something with the word “Fulbright,” she could have been more…together. She had no idea where the group was staying, and kept asking very basic questions about what there was to see in Tokyo. I had to reassure her that yes, her digital camera was actually capable of photographing the plane wing, as we took off (she wanted to show her low-income students what it would be like to be on a plane.) For some unknown reason, she suspected that it might not work.
Very different worlds, we come from – that social worker, and I. She probably thought of me as a spoiled yuppie traveler, and she’d largely be right.
Anyhow. Once on the ground, it was an uneventful, if somewhat tedious task to get to the apartment, and sign off on papers and such. I was feeling all proud of my ability to read buttons (I did a load of laundry, and even got the complex drying system going) until I wanted to take a shower. It seemed that there was no hot water no matter how I twisted the faucet handle. After splashing a bit with cold water, and resigning to try again in the morning, I found a dusty apartment manual underneath the tv.
Foolish foreigner that I am, I failed to recognize the electric panel in the kitchen as the hot water controller. You can use it to preset amounts of water to heat, and at what temperature, at what time. Presumably this is to ease the process of drawing a hot bath around home-from-work time. Or to somehow conserve energy.
