On Sunday, I went to visit a local church, Calvary Chapel Iwakuni. Since it was Easter, it was packed pretty full. The service was nice and I got to take part in a church picture that they take once a year after Easter service. After the picture, they had a potluck with lots of delicious food. I hung out for a bit and mostly talked to a pair of missionaries that were assisting the church. I also talked to the pastor for a few minutes before I headed back home to do laundry.
Monday was the scheduled orientation for all the people new to the base. I woke up bright and early and headed over to the meeting place. There were probably about fifty people in attendance. The first part of the morning consisted of many presentations, ranging from fairly short to somewhat long, mostly about what to expect from life on base, some of the more important offices, and the rules for people on base, some of which only applied to the military people. After all the presentations, there was a brief information fair, where people from many of the other offices and service providers on base came with papers to hand out and information to give. Most of the information was fairly inaudible, since everyone was competing to be heard over one another. I visited the few booths that were of interest and applicable to me, since many either focused on families with children or military members. Then we were given an hour for lunch, so I headed off to the food court to grab some grub before heading back for the second part of the orientation, the tour of the base and the city.
We all boarded the bus and headed off to explore the base while our tour guides gave a quick overview of the buildings as we drove by. We only made two stops on base, at the gym and the lounge for the Single Marine Program. We got a guided tour of the gym, which being on a military base, did have many useful facilities. They have everything from a pool to a place where you can rent all sorts of equipment for sporting purposes for free. The SMP lounge wasn't quite as exciting to me, since I would never be able to return again, so I took a quick look and headed over to the nearby Marine Mart to grab something to drink and a light snack before we headed off to the city.
We were joined by a new tour guide for this part of the tour, a member of the Cultural Adaptation team, who gave us all a small map of the city with several points of interest along our route labeled. She tried her best to give us a quick description of some of them as we drove by, along with a brief tutorial about how to ride Japanese buses(which of course I already knew, given my experiences on Saturday). The bus stopped at the local train station, where we broke into two groups, one to take a tour of the train station and the other to have some free time to do some shopping at the nearby stores. My group was the first to go into the train station, where our guide explained how the Japanese train system worked, including how to get to Hiroshima. That information was actually useful, since I'll have to go to the immigration office there, hopefully soon, to change my immigration status so I can stay in Japan. After that, it was our turn to go shopping. I was really tempted to buy a kendama at the 100 Yen store, but I refrained, at least for the time being. A 100 Yen store is basically the equivalent of a dollar store in the States.
Tuesday was back to work and some more training. And that takes us to the end of week one. Look for more in a few days.
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