Culture Shock

I arrived in Nagasaki yesterday for a conference. Unfortunately I'm staying in a different hotel from the rest of the conference mob (i.e. the only other people in Nagasaki that speak English). So I'm about 2 km down the road at the ANA, feeling slightly bewildered and to be honest, a bit culture-shocked.

I thought I was going to be able to use my Visa card for everything so I wasn't too fussed about getting some Yen before I left Australia. But I was very wrong. I haven't seen a single opportunity to use a Visa yet, and neither have I seen an ATM willing to take my Australian bank card. So money was my first problem. I solved that by getting money from my Visa account. This of course means you instantly start paying interest. So I decided to quickly head back to my hotel, jump on the internet and transfer the money over to pay off the visa account.

My laptop battery died before I had a chance to log in. No problem I thought, I'll just plug it in using the handy plug converter I brought with me. It wasn't handy at all as it turns out. I was under the impression that Japanese plug sockets were the same as North American but they are not. They do not have an earth pin. Therefore my handy plug converter with its earth pin would not plug in. Bugger. So I went down to the hotel reception and tried to ask if they had a plug converter that would work for me. Eventually they came back with this:

What am I meant to do with that? No seriously, I tried to ask them. They shrugged. Okkkkkaaaaayyyy. I was a teeny bit nervous about being electrocuted , but I plugged in my converter and then my laptop cable.


And amazingly, it worked. I may have been culture shocked but I wasn't electric shocked. The laptop charged and sparks didn't fly. It doesn't seem right though, does it? Does it? Leave a comment if you know.

I was so tired from being awake for 30 hours that I went to bed at 7 pm (but not before I exchanged the buckwheat filled pillows with fluffy pillows) and woke up at 5:30am this morning. I faffed around for a while with my free internet connection and my charged laptop, before heading off down to get my western breakfast. And I was hungry for waffles.

Breakfast was a bit weird, but dining alone always is. Firstly, not only was I the only westerner in the restaurant, but also the only woman. Luckily dining alone was no big deal, since about half the tables appeared to be business men dining alone.

The western food was certainly an interesting experience. They didn't have waffles. What they did have were a few tiny pieces of "pork in bacon" and "pork in sausage", with so few pieces available that I didn't feel comfortable taking more than 1 piece of each. They had "sunny side up" (i.e. eggs) served in little muffin cases! They had something akin to muesli and yogurt, upon which I poured blueberry sauce. That was good, but it would have been nice if the bowl was 10 times bigger. They also had croissants, but in fact they were more like bread rolls shaped like a croissant. So anyway, it wasn't the kind of buffet where you eat so much that you skip lunch. No, I was hungry an hour later. And by then I had found myself a Starbucks, where they spoke Engrish, and they handed me a menu as I walked in the door. The day was starting off quite well.