Commute to work

For my first week in Japan I will be trained in JST's Osaka Engineering Center, before moving out to the Tokyo Engineering Center. The picture above is me with the other JST interns commuting on the local trains. The train was pretty crowded. You can get a pretty good idea of how crowded the train was by looking at the bottom photo.

So the commute time to the Osaka Engineering Center is about an 1 hour and 15 minutes. We take the local train, transfer to the express train, take the subway to transfer to another station. I wear my backpack everyday to work. My back would hurt so much because the train was crowded. It was really hard to stand most of the times. I remember all the times I heard that in Japan you should think of others. So one day I decided to hold my backpack and not wear it. It was one of the best decisions I've made while commuting. My back stopped hurting, I was able to stand without any problems. I honestly think this is one of the harder thing to adjust to. In Japan people's personal space is so much smaller. I remember being back to back with random people.

This is the scene as we get transfer from Namba to the subway. The best way to describe this scene is like a school of fish travelling from one train to another train. It seems like people are going with the flow most of the time. Sometimes I wasn't sure where to go and I would just follow the wave of people and branch off where I needed to branch off.