The Sea Log Kept Ashore: First Week Summary

Hello everyone! I thought for this next post the best thing to do would be to answer everyone’s questions from their emails, so here it goes…

Being here so far has been great! Yes, we’re still in a hotel. Yes, the ship with our stuff on it still won’t be arriving for a couple more weeks. And yes, we still have to eat out for every meal. Other than that though, everything has been going pretty smoothly and we’ve been able to get out and do some pretty cool stuff.

Our first week here we had what is called AOB training. It’s five days in a classroom where we learn all about the base, it’s rules and laws, the laws of Japan, a lot about Japanese culture and how to drive on the left side of the road. For the most part it was actually great and I was so glad that they made us go to something like that. The only day that was a little painful was Tuesday. They pretty much sat us down for six hours to learn how to not binge drink, drink and drive, do drugs, rape people, beat your wife, murder local taxi drivers, or do anything else that could subject you to spending life in a Japanese prison with the other 23 Americans from the base that are already there. Needless to say I don’t think we really needed it but who knows, maybe it could come in handy one day.

Between 2-3 is when we got out of class. Usually right after we had to spend a couple of hours running errands but once we finished we always had plenty of time in the evenings to explore by ourselves. So far we’ve made a pretty good dent in Yokosuka (the city where we live); gone to Kamakura where we got to eat lunch with the mayor (he was trying to figure out how to make his city more “American friendly”) and see the Hachimangu Shrine; seen the Tokyo temple and seen another shrine in Tokyo that I’ll have to ask Ridge the name of.

Yokosuka and the surrounding cities actually aren’t too bad to navigate. The people here are used to having the 35k Americans from the base around so if you’re at a restaurant or at the train station you can usually figure things out, with some effort, by the few English words or pictures on the menu or map. Tokyo was definitely a different story though. If left by myself I would no doubt get lost and starve. Luckily the Navy planned for such things and at the AOB brief we each got a stack of these:

At first I thought it was funny. Now I’m holding onto them like they’re gold!

Wednesday night Ridge got to play on his ship’s softball team! I think that’s been his highlight of Japan so far. They stuck him in as catcher to see how he would do – to put things in perspective the other team put their 1 girl and worst player in as catcher – and he actually did pretty well! So well in fact that the other team pulled out the rulebook and tried to make them forfeit. Apparently you’re supposed to have played at least one regular season game to play in the playoffs. After much bickering though the other team conceded and The Fightin’ Fitz went on to win! Needless to say, however, Ridge is banned until next season.

Sunday we went to church. We had met another LDS couple in AOB and they had already made it one week to the ward. It was just like they described: a few adults and TONS of kids! Holy smokes! Ridge and I counted and there were 31 adults and close to forty kids. Who knows, there could have been more. They were running and crawling all over the place, it was hard to keep track. Most of them were young too. I saw 3 young women; maybe a couple of 9-10 year olds and that was it. The best part is, apparently once the families that left for the summer are back, the ratio is going to be worse! As a whole though the ward seems great. I think almost everyone came up to introduce themselves and offer us help. They all seem like really nice, awesome, solid people.

To sum things up, life here is pretty darn cool. I imagine I’ll have days where the culture shock is a little more hard to bear than others – probably during those months when I don’t have my translator and best friend with me :( - but it’s definitely worth it and I can’t wait for people to come and visit!