Deirdre's in Japan

Today was my first day trying to find Gandai (Iwate University) on the bus by myself, with no English announcements (or bus schedules) to aid me...

Still, I did it! And didn't even get lost!

On the way there, I asked two ladies if the bus stopped at 上田二丁目 (ueda ni chome, my bus stop). Their reply was a little too fast for me to understand, but they were nodding, so I assumed I was on the right track and thanked them. They also made sure I knew when to push the stop button, and even told me that I had to go down a side street to reach Gandai (which I already knew, but still), so basically they were super-nice and I was felt reassured about asking Japanese strangers for directions--especially when I have written directions to point at in case they can't understand my hopefully-polite-but-still-gaijin-Japanese.

I met Lucy and Nicole for lunch in Gandai's cafeteria, which was surpringly delicious (and soooo much better than Saga, not that that's hard to achieve). I had several varieties of tofu and two cartons of cafe au lait (mm).

Anyway, I'll leave you all alone for now.

More tomorrow!

~Dre

Okay, the first week seemed to take forever, but it was a very nice forever. I stayed at a ryokan (Japanese-style inn) with my whole group, and we ate tons of delicious food and frolicked around downtown Morioka. I'm already buying clothes. And umbrellas...so many umbrellas.

I'm also on a mission to drink coffee from every coffee shop in Morioka before I leave. I think I can do it.

The silliest story of week one was probably when, on our
second or third day in Japan, I was walking down the street
with 4 other girls in my group, and this Japanese car stopped in the middle of
the street beside us. Two Japanese women jumped out
and started asking us questions about where we were
from and what we were doing in Morioka. Then they
asked if they could interview us for the radio. We all
had places to be in 45 minutes, so we were hesitant,
but eventually gave in. They met us back at the inn,
dragged a microphone chord through the side door and interviewed us LIVE on the radio. We were awkwardly sharing ear-buds so that we could hear the guy at the radio station as he talked to us, and some of it was too fast to understand. But she had us all say "konnichi-wa" into the microphone and such. She also said we were "go-nin beauuuuty" (five beauties, hehe). It was so weird.

They also took our picture to post on the website, which can be found here:
http://podcast.ibc.co.jp/shop/
Since it's an older story, you have to scroll all the way down and click the button that looks like this: ≪前へ

Anyway, farewell for now!