Forgive the delay in posting...

9/4/2011
We've been in Japan for 5 days now.
A lot of folks back home keep asking questions along the lines of "How do you like living in Japan?" and "Don't you love it?"
So I'm taking some time to answer these questions with my typical (albeit silent) response:
We are not "living" here. Not really. We are staying in a Navy Lodge hotel room. Imagine an efficiency apartment. Got that in your mind? Ok, good. Our room is smaller than that.
No, I don't love it. See the preceding paragraph.
We've been here 5 days. We don't even have driver's licenses yet, so don't expect to see a whole lot of new pictures, and we certainly won't have many stories for a while. We're not on vacation, people. We're still "arriving".

Ok, now that's out of my system.
There are a few things that have happened worth noting...for instance, taking my advancement exam approximately 24 hours after we landed.
And there's always the challenge of figuring out exactly what those kanji, hiragana & katakana symbols are trying to tell me.
Pictures help, of course. Still, some things are unexpected...like when you choose what appears to be grape pop from the vending machine. And it turns out to be some kind of carbonated grape jelly in a pop can.
No, really:

You can see the jelly-ness of it, creeping slowly out of the can. Kinda weird. And even creepier, when you don't expect it to have the consistency of jello.
 

Did I mention the spiders? They are huge (although I have been assured there are no poisonous species living on Kyushu.)

That thing? Is as big as my hand.

I might feel a little more chipper about this place in a month or so.