The Adventure Begins

Today is my first full day in Japan. It's 4:00pm and I'm "taking a rest". So far, it's so different from America! Today I woke up, skyped my parents and went downstairs. The younger siblings were watching High School Musical with japanese subtitles so I watched that while I ate breakfast. Breakfast was scrambled eggs, a roll, plain lettuce, and sausage(?) or some kind of meat. The parents had both gone to work when I got up so Yuho, my host sister, made my breakfast. Then I took a shower and got ready for the day. My host dad came home around noon and, after lots of confusion, explained to me that I had to get my picture made and then go to city hall to register since I was a foreigner. We went to the photo studio to get pictures to put on my foreign registration and waited for them to be processed. Then, we headed on to city hall and waited there for a while to get a foreigner's pass. After that, around 2pm, we went to a sushi restaurant. It was serve-yourself and there were moving conveyer belts of sushi by all the tables. The host father insisted I try a lot of different dishes, so I did. I tried nato,  a fermented soy bean roll, which I did not care for. Then I tried a raw salmon roll which was better and I actually really liked. That ended up being my favorite thing. I also tried a shrimp roll which was also good. The last roll I tried was raw horse mackerel. It was not my favorite thing I've ever eaten. It was very different from the food I'm used to eating. That was definitely an adventure! After the mackerel, I had decided I'd had enough and politely refused the other rolls and dessert. Next, we drove to a drugstore to get some things that I had forgotten to pack. The only problem was everything, obviously, was in Japanese and Yuho and her father barely spoke English. It took us a good 45 minutes to find the right kind of razor and toothpaste I wanted (The family's toothpaste flavor is salt, which is the most common in Japan. So it took a while to find mint.) So far, I've been pretty jet lagged but I'm trying to stay up without taking a nap until it's time to go to bed to start adjusting to Japanese time. That's hard to do considering it's 2am in America right now and it's 9am American time when I go to bed here. That resulted in 3 hours of sleep last night. Overall, I'm having a good time! The language barrier is pretty hard. Google Translate, hand motions, and lots of smiling and laughing are helping though. I start school on the 25th, Thursday, so I only have 2 more days to get rid of my jet lag. I'll be giving a speech in Japanese that day to 2,000 students so I'm praying I'll be caught up on sleep!
-AC