The First Entry from Japan!

Ok, so far I have finished with 3 days of Orientation in Tokyo and have reached my final destination, the town of Hamochihongo on Sado Island in Niigata Prefecture.
The orientation was pretty much just meetings and seminars about the JET program, but we were pretty much free to sleep or walk around Tokyo after 3:00 each day. I did a little bit of both. There were actually a few people at the orientation that I knew from Waseda. Small world.
I left Tokyo by bullet train and ended up in Niigata City where my supervisor, Mr. Otsuka, a very kind and helpful man, showed me and the other Sado ALT(Asst. Language Teacher), Charles, to the jetfoil so we could get to Sado. After a 1 hour ride, I arrived at Ryotsu Port and met the other JET teachers on Sado, all of whom have been very welcoming. I was then carried off to meet the superintendant, my Board of Education director, and I was finally taken to my apartment/house. (Pictures are coming soon in a MTV Cribs: Sado Style Blog Update).
Sado has just about as much green on it as Tokyo has steel and glass. There are rice fields all over the place! The sea is as blue as it can be, the forests are a rich green, and they are packed full of trees. Being as there is so much nature here, there is little else. Don’t get me wrong, Sado has pretty much everything we need, but it’s no metropolis. My own town, Hamochihongo, is very small, but it has all of the things I need to live within walking distance. It has a “This is ‘town’ “ (Enter Joe Dirt accent here) type of feel to it. All of the Southerners reading this know what I’m talk’n about.
So far I have really just been meeting with teachers, filling out forms, and preparing to live here for the next year. There are going to be several festivals, about 5 or so, on the island within the next month so lots of pictures and good stories are sure to come. I’ll try to keep these entries shorter so they are easier to read. Thanks for being interested guys ; )