After enjoying a night in a hotel, my host Rotarian picked me up at 10 a.m. the next morning. The plan was to take me to the apartment near the university that I was going to sublet for the next few months. The apartment belongs to another peace fellow from the year before who is currently doing her internship in South Africa. She had also sublet her apartment to a different fellow in my class who came early and stayed for the month of July. When we arrived, the apartment was kind of a mess because the fellow was still in the process of cleaning and moving out and my host was horrified.
He wouldn't let me stay there because of the chaos and instead, took me to the Buddhist temple where he works and is the head priest and overseer. The temple always has visiting priests so they had many separate tiny condos, one of which was available for me to use for awhile. I appreciated the generosity but was also a bit nervous because the Buddhist temple was almost two hours outside the center of Tokyo. Being that I don't speak Japanese and had zero concept of the layout of the city or how the transport system worked, I was more than a little nervous about getting to my Japanese class on my own the next day.
My host, Nobuyuki Okamoto has been a Buddhist priest at temples in New York, Los Angeles and Hawaii. His English is amazing and he was good at explaining things that he knew would be strange for me since he'd spent so much time in the U.S.
After dropping off my bags at the temple and having tea with the other priests, we had lunch at a really fancy traditional Japanese restaurant in our own private room surrounded by ridiculously manicured gardens, decorative bridges and koi ponds. The lunch consisted of nine courses and everything revolved around presentation. Before each course, our own private waitress elaborately explained what the food was, where it came from and what it meant.
Tired, sweaty and a bit jet-lagged, I devoured everything, even several dishes with strange creatures full of eyes that even Nobuyuki couldn't identify. It was a really cool experience and I wish Sean could have been there to share it with me as I know he would have loved all the sushi. But here, I'm assured, there's plenty more where that came from.
After lunch, I headed back to my condo on the temple grounds and Nobuyuki promised to research public transportation options for me for the next day. I tried to stay awake as long as I could but ended up crashing at about 5pm. Fortunately, being wide awake at three a.m. the next morning gave me ample time to figure out how to use the crazy and indecipherable self-filling mini bath tub and fancy toilet.
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