Departures, Arrivals and Japanese hospitality

April 1st
I’ll take this opportunity to thank everyone for allowing me to have a great last memory of everyone home in Australia. I had a blast at my farewell and am going to miss everyone.

Also, I loved reading everyone’s goodbye notes. Some of them get 10 points for creativity (Tim and Nath, Jacqui and Amy, John). Departures are always hard and the flight from Australia to Bangkok was no exception. To be honest, I had trouble speaking to the lady at the hand luggage as I was a bit of a blubbering mess. But, while I still miss everyone, excitement and intrigue has well and truly become the feelings of the day! And thanks again to those who saw me off at the airport (sorry for making you cry Febe).

Anyway, on to Japan…
I was picked up from Nagoya airport by a man from London named Jeff. He was very helpful. He showed me my apartment in a part of Nagoya called Hongo. He showed me where to shop, where to eat how to buy train tickets and a host of other useful things. Nagoya is a city of 2.2 million people.

He then introduced me to the only other trainee to have arrived; a girl from Sydney named Emma. She was so excited when she heard another Australian accent (she had been in Japan for a couple of weeks.) In spite of the fact that I hadn’t slept for over 27 hours, we decided to go into Sakae and Nagoya and do some shopping (and try and talk with the locals).

We had lunch at a little café where we ordered our meals from vending machines! They looove their vending machines here! We put our money in the machine and it gave us a ticket, which we then took to the counter to collect our meal (which, by the way, was ready in a jiffy.)

Our shopping was quite successful, despite our combined Japanese being terribly low. We managed to find and purchase everything we were looking for and had a blast while doing it. The level of English in Nagoya is really quite low. Most people smile and blush a little when they try to speak even a little English. It seems majority of people know almost no English whatsoever. That’s a good thing though; it’ll force me to learn some more Japanese quick smart!

Emma got us temporarily lost on the way to an internet café in Fujigoako. It took my experienced map reading skills (thanks Geoscience at Monash!) to get us back on track. Keep in mind that the map we were using was entirely in Japanese. We had to gauge by the angles at which roads were to each other.

However, if we hadn’t got lost we might not have ever seen a beautiful part of the city that we did. We went found a street lined with Sakura (cherry blossoms) in bloom. It was absolutely gorgeous. On the way back at night it was even more stunning.
All in all today was a successful day. I’ve fallen in love with this beautiful, cosy city.
Sayonara.
Stef xo