宇宙、そこは最後のフロンテイア。

So, forget Lipton and the Lipton rant (for now) because I'm in tea land (like Disneyland except the only ride is the tea cup ride and tea cups are full of tea). Here, there's tea in the vending machines, tea in the convenience stores, drink bars aka TEA BUFFETS in the restaurants..like I said. Tea land.

I really knew I had a ticket for tea land when the airline served hot green tea in little white tea cups. And that tea was better than the tea served in many Japanese restaurants in the states.

However, there is only one drawback to delicious tea served on a plane, and I had misfortunately stated a preference for a window seat when buying a ticket. I'm sure you can imagine my predicament. This was made worse by the fact that the two seats next to me were filled with two lumps of sleeping Japanese business men, both of whom had annoyingly long legs. Next time, of course, I will be wiser and state a preference for the aisle, but really, who could have expected delicious hot airline tea?

Aside from this single setback, it was a very nice flight. Sipping my tea, I watched the new Star Trek movie dubbed in Japanese. And then I watched it four times more, so as to be able to quote Spock in Japanese.

The plane arrived at Narita airport, where I was welcomed by my two "big sisters", Misaki and Moeka. Since then, Misa and Moeka have showed me around and done their best to make sure I don't make too much of a dummy of myself in public.

Classes don't begin until the 24th, thanks to a fortuitous string of national holidays that fall between then and orientation (which ended on the 16th). That gives us exchange students a large block of time to get used to our surroundings and to play around. Because of this free time, and my shiny new digital camera, I have many pictures to post! You can see them here at my flickr account.

I should probably apologize for all of the spiders. Um.

I WAS on track and taking pictures of the school like I was supposed to be doing, but then there were these awesome spiders, well, you'll see them. I lovingly (and obsessively) took some fifty or sixty macro shots of them. I only saved the better of them, though, and having already exceeded my flickr bandlimit for this month, I won't be uploading any more for a while.

Sorry if they freak you out, but if they weren't possibly poisonous and undoubtedly bite-y, I would give them a hug.

Oh and one last thing. The subways in Tokyo are completely and utterly clean. There is no garbage, and there are no little mice scurrying about to scare AK. It doesn't even smell. You can practically eat off of the floor.

People wear face masks anyway, though.