Jet Lag, Emotional Instability and Getting Lost

Yesterday Chiemi and I went to the Ward Office and filled out the paperwork for my Alien Registration Card and National Health Insurance. I was so happy to be out and about in Tokyo that it did not occur to me that I had gotten almost no sleep for about 2 days and walking around in the middle of the day in the heat and humidity might not be wise. No surprise that I started to feel dizzy and disoriented. I really wanted to go shopping after we left the Ward Office so I tried to muscle through. Bad move, really bad move. About 20 minutes into shopping, I started to get nauseous. I asked Chiemi if we could go back to the apartment and we walked back to the bus stop and took the bus back to our neighborhood and walked from the bus stop back to our apartment. In other words I needed to be off my feet as soon as possible and as soon as possible was about a mile of walking and twenty minutes on a hot bus.
The exhaustion had hit me like a ton of bricks and I completely lost control of my emotions. I bit my lip and tried not to cry on the way back to the apartment but as soon as I got through the lobby door, I started to sob. I scared poor Chiemi to death. Sobbing and gasping for breath I keep saying "I'm fine" in broken, barely coherent Japanese. We came upstairs and I immediately collapsed in my room and slept for about three hours. After I woke up I apologized to Chiemi and told her it was just the jet lag but I am pretty sure she did not take her eyes off of me for the rest of the evening (I think she thought I would take the first chance I got to throw myself off the balcony.)
I managed to get another 5 hours of sleep last night and woke up as a coherent human being again. It is a good thing too because today I took the train by myself for the first time. The good news is I only got lost once. The bad news is I got lost Inside the Shibuya train station and it still took me an hour to figure out where I needed to go. Shibuya is the neighborhood in Tokyo that most people picture when they think of Japan. Huge buildings, huge video billboards and as I found out the hard way a Huge train station.
It happened when I was coming back from the first day of school orientation. The scary part about orientation was that even after all the hoops I had to jump through to get here, the five hours of bad power point presentations made me think I should have stayed home and gotten and real estate license instead. The only good thing about orientation is that I made some new friends (check out the picture).
The other pictures are of my favorite part of my commute. I cut through the grounds of a Shinto shrine to get to my train station. How cool is that!

I think I am going to like it here.
Liz