After a 14 hour flight and almost 24 hours of total travel time, I finally made it to Tokyo to start my training as a ninja. I figure this skill will add quite nicely to the kung fu training I had in China last year. I’m not sure if my next bit of training will be as a Jedi or working on becoming a white wizard like Gandalf. Ok, so it’s not quite true that I’m here for ninja training (although it would be pretty awesome if it was) instead I’m here for work. So far I’ve been here two days and already learned that not everyone is named Mr. Roboto or Miyagi-san. I spent Sunday walking around with one of my co-workers for hanami, which is the viewing of the cherry blossoms. This is a very popular thing to do in Japan when they are blooming and many people will have parties underneath the trees. After walking around some of the parks, we headed off to Tokyo Tower to check out the tower and head up for a view of the city. While viewing the city, I realized that Tokyo was not quite what I expected. I was expecting to see a city full of skyscrapers, but instead saw very few. Instead of growing up, Tokyo sees to have grown out. This means that it takes quite a bit of time to get from one part of the city to another, but luckily Tokyo has a fantastic train system, although it can be quite difficult to figure out.
Monday brought about the first day of work. The plan was to go to one of the new base station sites for the installation. I was kind of excited because this would be my first site installation and I was curious as to how it was done. By noon I was no longer excited. We spent the day standing on a roof while we watched the installation team do all of the work. The installation team is hired by the owner of the base station to put in the equipment and we (the vendor who sold the equipment) do not touch anything as we are there only for support. It is actually a good thing to be standing around not doing much because that means that nothing had gone wrong! I’m hoping that the rest of my time here is just as exciting (well the work part anyway), because that means we did something right (well many somethings) and the customer is happy. I do look forward to my time away from work and getting a chance to explore Tokyo some more. I just hope that I can get adjusted to the time change and get a good night’s sleep!