JAPAN PART 2

Day 1 – touchdown and some adventures in Osaka

We touched down at Kansai International at 7 am Japanese time on Sunday morning after having a ridiculous attempt at sleeping in the plane.

“Would you like to have Malaysian fried rice with chicken satay or the omelette with potatoes for breakfast?” asks a very chirpy flight attendant at 4 am. Groggily I say I would prefer the fried rice. Anyway, who on earth (besides people who really have to) has breakfast at 4 am?

We waited a bit for other trainees from other countries, got to know each other and took a long ride in an airport limo bus to the train station nearest to where we were supposed to stay throughout our training… a boarding house also known as a dormitory. The rooms were really nice and spacious, and at that moment the *sun was actually shining into the room and the effect was just lovely!

The room without the sun... The floor is lined with Katami - (something like a mat that helps keep off the cold)

While some of them slept (catching up on lost sleep from the night before) my colleague (Hud) and **another trainee (Lor) from the company next door and I took an ½ hour walk to the train station. We split ways at the train station where Hud and I went on towards Universal Studios Japan (USJ) and Lor went to meet his brother.

USJ was a place full of sights that needed to be photographed – seeing that we don’t have one in Malaysia. We skipped We saw this tiny monkey right outside Universal Studios

the rides as we lacked time (it was 3 pm by the time we went in, and it gets dark by around 5 pm) and walked into every street that we could and stopped by to check out several places. I felt as though I was transported into many different movie scenes along those roads.

One of the streets in USJ

Later that night we had dinner with our advisor at a sushi bar where he recommended the good stuff to us. Eel (or Unagi) is simply excellent!

On a totally different note, all forms of communication were unavailable as non-Japanese phone models (as well as non-3G phones and SIM cards) were not able to perform roaming services as they do in other countries. Just my luck… even the international call card that I purchased was unusable because no one knew how to use it to make calls!

As for internet access, that’s a whole different story!

*sun – you see the sun shining brightly and you’re glad, alas, it’s all for show. Even when there is no wind blowing at you, you still feel the cold creeping in.

** this other trainee (Lor) is also from Malaysia – but from our sister company and would end up being labeled as one of the funniest guys we have ever met (despite him insisting that he’s actually a very serious person…. Ha! Ha!)

To be continued….