The Third Day

On Tuesday, my third day in Japan, we woke up for another Western-style breakfast. After which we were separated into groups more specific to our future jobs. I was placed with many other Senior High School ALTs and we spent the day in various workshops discussing reading, writing, speaking, and otherwise communicating in English with High School kids.
For lunch we had a Japanese-style curry and salad before returning to our workshops. Just before closing for the day, we were asked to use a shipping service set up in the hotel to send ahead the majority of our luggage to our respective schools. This was to avoid having to carry large suitcases onto the Shinkansen (bullet train) the next day where there would be very limited space. However, it turns out that my luggage was feeling particularly moody that day because it suddenly broke open in the front. It made for some minor stress but luckily the shipping company agreed to ship it anyway.
Following the orientation activities, we were once again unleashed onto the mad streets of Tokyo.

 At the insistence of one of the other ALTs, we journeyed via subway to my first authentic Japanese ramen restaurant. It was pretty delicious, but absolutely massive and I didn’t even come close to finishing it. 

Massive ramen bowl.

After ramen we head out to find a particular ice cream place, recommended by yet another ALT. It featured about 6 or 7 different flavours, all layered on top of each other and it took about 5 of us to finish it.
Having sufficiently filled our bellies to bursting we set out for the Japanese government buildings. These are two identical buildings which provide a beautiful view of Tokyo from the top floor. 

View from the Tokyo government buildings.

We were able to souvenir shop for quite a while while we were there, but I heroically resisted temptation and didn’t buy anything. We had made plans to continue the evening in the wee hours, but at this point we were exhausted from our long day (jet lag still had many of us waking up before 5am) and generous amount of walking so we shuffled back to the hotel and called in a night.