City of Hachinohe, Aomori Prefecture

I'm a hotel in Aomori prefecture, right next to the Shinkansen (Bullet train) station. Finished up training this morning and hopped on the train immediately, rode twoa nd ahalf hours to here. The countryside on the way up was absolutely beautiful, really stunning stuff. Japan's terrain seems divided into two categories. Huge, stark mountains and flatness, which occur in some pretty interesting combinations. I tried taking pictures as i drove, but didn't figure out i could change the shutter speed on my camera until later tonight.

I mean, I'm not sure how I could've made it not be blurry. I took the damn picture from a freaking bullet train.

Last night the whole class went out together as a group, trainers included. We went to an all-you cna eat/drink resturant, which was one floor below a all-you-can-drink karaoke bar. Needless to say, certain individuals (possibly including myself) found themselves a little less tharsty. Karaoke is wicked fun, we sang everything from "Living on a Prayer" to "Twist and shout" and some lame-ass girl wanted to sing the japanese pop songs she liked but we discussed the matter as a group and decided to boo the hell out of her and skip the song.

Ended up at a bar with three other folks attempting to communicate about yakyu (baseball) with our poor waitress.

Oh, check this out:

That, my friends, is the light switch for my room. yeah. I couldn't figure it out for the first ten minutes, but then i stuck my key in the damn hole and the room lit up. I think that's wicked cool, even if it doesn't make too much sense.

A note about Aomori: in the words of one of my trainers, "it's really Japanese up there." Basically, I may be the only foreign person the locals have seen in the past six months. In tokyo, it was strange to be looked at all the time, but there were plenty of other gaijin (foreign-people) around so the Tokyoians were very accepting. I mean, if you stood outside with a beer in your hand they would immediately assume you were drunk and going to assault them, but you can just smile. During training, we would gather outside the hotel during breaks, standing in the alley between the two lobbies of the hotel, and cars would drive by with the passengers' faces plastered to the window, oggling the crowd of gaijin. One of my trainers finally said, "hey, if they're going to stare, you may as well wave..."

Here, I can tell already, folks are not really sure what the deal with me is. Lots of stares, but nothing more. It's totally fine, I've just never expereinced it before.

Tomorrow: Higashidori village, the town of 5000 people where I will live for the next seven months. Booyeah. That's what's hot in the streets.