AOB/ICR

Jason and I are spending this week attending mandatory classes called AOB (Area Orientation Brief) and ICR (Intercultural Relations). It's a stressful week for me because we have to leave the kids in childcare. Cammie loves it, but it's a pretty bad deal for little Abe. His sitters say he cries pretty much all day. Only 3 more days!

Yesterday was AOB.  We spent from 8:30 AM to 3:30 PM sitting in a hot classroom, listening to representatives from various organizations on base talk about what they do.  Some of the information was really useful, a little bit of it was interesting, but most of it felt like a waste of time.  Especially since we've been here for a week and figured out a lot of things on our own already.

Here are some of the interesting tidbits from our class yesterday:

-Japan means business about drunk driving. The legal limit here is .03 (it's .08 in the states).  You can get a DUI for operating a bicycle. If you're a passenger in a car being driven by somebody whose BAC is .03 or higher, you will get a DUI along with the driver because you were an accomplice in letting someone drive drunk. You can also get a DUI for providing alcohol to someone who is going to be driving or providing a vehicle to someone who has been drinking.

-Since they're so strict about DUI's, our base dose random breathalyzer tests as people enter and exit the base. Not a problem for Jason and me, but I can see how this could stress a lot of sailors out.

-If, for some reason, somebody with the military gets arrested, the Japanese government doesn't have to let anyone know for 23 days. Apparently a preteen got arrested a few years ago for shop lifting and his parents didn't know what happened to him for over 10 days. Can you imagine?

-Japan is very safe--there are 1.3 robberies per 100,000 people here, while there are 411 robberies per 100,000 people in the US. But we did have a Crime Scene Investigator come freak us out about a couple of things.  For example, bath salt. Not the nice relaxing bath kind, but the scary eat-someone's-face-off drug kind--TOTALLY LEGAL HERE. You could buy them at a corner store if you wanted.

And that pretty much covers all the interesting things they managed to teach us over the course of 7 hours. Today we started learning about culture shock, a few basics of Japanese culture and took our drivers tests (I PASSED!). Tomorrow we do more culture lessons, and then on Thursday they let us loose at the train station. We can go wherever we want as long as we're back to pick up the kids on time. The other big catch is that we have to figure out how to get there and back by ourselves. I have a feeling it's going to be a frustrating day. 

Wish me luck! I'll be back with pictures after our field trip!