Atsui Atsugi

This one will try to be more briefly informative. After arriving, I spent the night at the Narita Hilton - a seemingly classy place from the lobby, but not really what I would have expected for the price. I suppose the service more than made up for the plain feel of the room. They were content to take my bags from me after I stepped off the bus and bring them up to my room so I could check in without the two monstrous eyesores offending other patrons. Looking back, I'm still grateful to the hotel for at least providing me with the soap and toothpaste to keep me presentable until I could acquire some from a store. The tub was deep (never long, unfortunately), and so I calmly soaked in hot water for a while (alternating legs and torso) before going to bed.

I took the same airport shuttle back to Narita in the morning and bought a bus ticket for Atsugi. None of this was complex, by the way, because the service industry is incredibly accommodating in that as soon as you can approach someone their gaijin detector has already been triggered and they are speaking to you in English. If you find yourself on this island sometime in the future, fret not - thousands of foreign businessmen each year manage to make it home, you can too!

My first impression of Japan, by the way: HOT. I don't sweat that much, but I sure made up for lost time as soon as I stepped out of the air-conditioned terminal and into the hellfire called August. The online dictionary translates mushi-atsui to "humid", but that doesn't really do it justice. Atsui already means "hot", and I like to think of mushi as the disgusting, heavy feeling of the humidity hovering around, forming your own personal greenhouse. Mushi translates directly to "steaming". All of those long dress pants and shirts I brought... *sigh* this is the summer of their discontent.

In most civilized nations, one would stave off such monumental discomfort with the century-old technology we have all come to know and love as "air conditioning". Indeed, this has proved so useful that it has spread all over the world, even to my dorm room! So all is not lost. Playing around with all of the buttons and sliders in an attempt to understand what they do is a good way to pick up some Japanese, much better than if it were the controls to a forklift.