Sunday, November 19

Morning: Breakfast at hotel restaurants

I accidentally deleted my photo of today’s breakfast. I had eggs, bacon, sausage, fruit, French fries and bamboo. Yes, you read that all correctly.

7:30-8:30am: Bring your luggage to lobby

9:05am: Complete hotel check out

9:20am: Meet in lobby

9:35am: Depart hotel

10:35am: Arrive Haneda Airport and check in

While waiting in the terminal, I paid 200 ($2) yen for a 10-minute massage in this chair. Much like the chairs I sold while working at Brookstone, this was a great massage for not much money and made sitting in the airport wonderful.

11:35am: Depart Haneda Airport (ANA Flight #251)

The airport was like a mall. It was impeccably clean and had wonderful restaurants and shops. The food plaza had amazing pastries and a wide variety of food items. I actually bought and ate a hot dog with cheese ironically. It wasn’t that great; I should have stuck to the Japanese food. There was also an observation area where you could walk outside to watch planes take off and see the sea right off the edge of the airport property.

11:35am Depart Haneda Airport (ANA251)

The flight was pretty good. Although there was some turbulence, a flight time of 90 minutes flew by. This flight had a feature I've never experienced before. While taxiing and during takeoff, a view from the nose of the plane and then the underbelly showed a pilot's eye view of the procedure. It was like riding a roller coaster. Then, during the descent and approach the same thing occurred. The picture here is of the runway as we are approaching.

1:30pm: Arrive Fukuoka Airport

3:30pm: Arrive hotel and check in

We’re staying at what’s called a resort, but is really more of motel style place. It’s right on the Sea of Japan though which is pretty nice. We passed our first bits of open space including rice paddies. I took a nap with the sounds of waves crashing out my window. This hotel does have baths which are public and communal. I am thinking of going for it later tonight. There are also extensive vending machines here. You can buy soda, snacks, beer, full meals like spaghetti, everything. There are table tennis and air hockey too.

Evening: Dinner on your own

The hotel includes a traditional home's shoe/sandal policy. In this picture you can see my regular shoes on the tile facing the door. The blue sandals are outside sandals and can not be worn onto the wood of the inside. The green sandals are the inside only sandals. In homes, we can also expect a toilet (bathroom) only pair of sandals to deal with.

Kevin (Alaska – Art), Karen (Pennsylvania – English), Rachel (Texas – Reading Specialist) and I decided not to stay at the hotel for dinner even though the nearest place required a taxi drive. The hotel manager offered, through our guide/interpreter, to drive us to this restaurant himself. He drove us and Kevin and I got some good information out of him. He lives 50 minutes from the hotel and works 9am until 8pm. He is separated from his wife and two children which he seemed to be pretty upset about. When we arrived at the restaurant (basically a Denny’s), he came inside and explained to the employees that they needed to call a taxi for us and where that taxi should drop us off. We enjoyed a wonderful dinner including drinks. I had salmon with the usual side dishes, miso soup, white rice, etc. This cost $4.50. Salmon for under $5. And good salmon at that.

When we got back to the hotel we hung out around the gaming tables and vending machines for awhile. We had some really great conversations about how schools, teaching preparation and licensing standards differ among our four states. It was a valuable discussion that was pretty eye-opening in some regards.

I experienced my first public bath situation tonight. After initially thinking I’d forego the experience for now, I decided that I’m in a different culture and I needed to do everything I could to adapt and experience all that it had to offer. I’ll try to describe the experience in an appropriate amount of detail so readers understand how it works.

First, I put on a robe and jacket, provided in my room, and made my way down to the lobby. Upon entering the first entry foyer area, I removed my slippers and placed them into a cubby. Then I walked into a typical locker area where I removed the robe and jacket and brought my washcloth through the sliding doors into the bath area. I’d read about how to approach the next few steps so I had some idea of the procedure. There were two older men in there already in varying stages of the ritual so I took cues from them as well. I sat down on the stool and used the handheld nozzle to wet myself down. I washed my hair and body using the provided shampoo and soap. This process led me to probably the cleanest I’ve ever been after a shower before. The idea is that you must be completely clean before you enter the communal bath. After rinsing off the soap and shampoo, I repeated this with whatever was in the bottle simply labeled “rinse.” While in the rinse mode, one of the guy, on his way out, stopped by and told me that I should use soap first and rinse last. I thanked him and continued. By the time this was done, both other men had finished their cleaning, gotten into the bath and left. These people spend 5-10 minutes cleaning and then less than 5 in the bath. I got into the very hot water and tried to relax. This was difficult because in the meantime three others had entered ranging in age from 7-8 to mid 20s and I wasn’t entirely comfortable. I kept my cool and stayed in the bath with all of them without eye contact or communication. After getting out, I returned to the locker area to dry off. Then I dried my hair using the provided dryer, got the robe back on and made my way back up to my room.

It wasn’t as relaxing as I’d heard it should be, but I’m glad I made the effort to give it a try and experience the bath firsthand. Now it’s time to get settled for the night because tomorrow is our first of a series of public school visits.