Jet-lag, which I just tried to spell "jet-leg" just to prove how jet-lagged I am

Well, I didn’t wind up sleeping. At all. And that worked out surprisingly well. I was a lot more alert than the people who took one or two hour naps and then got up at 3 a.m.

The flight to San Francisco was pretty uneventful, other than my falling asleep and waking up to discover that my passport was missing. Fortunately, it turned out that it had just fallen off my lap and under my seat, but that definitely could have ended badly. I’m sticking my passport and ticket in my book* from now on.

Anyway, now I’m sitting on the flight to Osaka. We have traveled 1440 miles, according to my handy-dandy seat display thing. But then again, the seat display says that we’ve been traveling for 13:40, and I can tell you that we have not been traveling for either 13 hours and 40 minutes or 13 minutes and 40 seconds.

I watched the second half of How to Train Your Dragon in Japanese, mostly ‘cause it seemed like a good way to avoid eating the god-awful airplane food they gave us.***** I was pleasantly surprised by how much I understood of what they were saying. Of course, every time the blacksmith/trainer guy (I’m forgetting his name; I want to say “Horst,” but that’s the blacksmith in Eragon) opened his mouth, I got totally lost. And I could only understand Hiccup’s dad****** about half of the time. Still, it was good practice, I suppose.

Okay, I’m going to stop typing now. I will probably type more when I actually land in Osaka, and cut up this earlier stuff so it is interesting to read and not me rambling on about random things because I am stuck on an airplane and don’t have a whole lot else to do. じゃ、またね。

*I’m currently reading Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell**, which is fatter than I am...literally. So far it’s okay, if exceedingly verbose. I’m not sure whether I enjoy the writing style yet, because the author keeps telling me what to think about the characters, which ticks me off, and then balances that out by inserting an awesome bit of narration.

**Silly British people, not putting periods after their abbreviated honorifics.***

***I just footnoted a footnote in a footnote.**** I’m not sure that’s legal.

****I blame the footnoting on Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Although those footnotes’re nowhere near as interesting to read as the ones in The Bartimaeus Trilogy.

*****Seriously, it was so bad that I didn’t even finish it. I think this is the first time I haven’t finished a meal on an airplane since the upside-down cheeseburger incident.

******Or should I say “Hikku’s dad”? They changed basically all the names in Japanese, probably so that they would be the same number of syllables as in English. Hiccup became “Hikku”; Astrid became “Asuti”; and Toothless became “Tuusu.” I think Ruffnut and Tuffnut stayed the same, but I only heard their nicknames, and I couldn’t tell with anyone else. Oh, wait, “night fury” became…”naito fyuri.” But, really, the dub was surprisingly good. Way better than most American dubs. Probably because they had voice actors who could actually act.

This is me writing again, but this time I’m at a hotel in Kyoto. I have a lot to write about, but I’m exhausted ‘cause we wound up being traveling for 27 hours, so I’m gonna try to keep it short. (Plus I think I'll forget a lot of important stuff, but oh well.)

I spent the rest of my flight to Japan watching Wall-E in Japanese (surprisingly similar to the English version, except when Auto and the captain showed up and I had no idea what anyone was saying), reading, and generally hating air travel. We got off the plane and through customs okay, and then rode a bus for an hour and a half from Osaka to Kyoto.

On the bus ride, I found out the name of the host family I’ll be staying with. It’s a mom, a dad, and two sons, ages 8 and 12. They’ve never hosted a student before, so we’ll see how that goes. Fortunately, their house is only a ten minute walk from the university, which is awesome, given that some of my classmates have hour-long commutes. Anyway, I’ll be meeting them on Sunday morning.

We all went out to dinner (except for my roommate, who went out to meet her boyfriend), and now I’m back in the hotel room, typing this up and wishing I could go to sleep, even though it’s not even eight o’ clock yet. I kind of have to stay awake for a while longer so my sleep schedule isn’t totally out of whack, plus I’m going to need to let my roommate back in, ‘cause we only have one room key, and I’m the one who has it right now. Oh well. It gives me a reason to try to stay relatively awake.

Anyway, we have placement exams first thing in the morning tomorrow, and then ANOTHER orientation. YAAAAAAAAAAAY. By the end of this, my brains are going to be orientated out of my friggin' skull.