Yesterday I attended my scheduled 2020 Olympics training session at the National Olympics Memorial Youth Center in the Sangubashi neighborhood, near Shinjuku.

I hadn’t been to that neighborhood before. It’s just two stops from Shinjuku (3 minutes) but a world of difference. It’s much quieter, with some nice hills and interesting shops and restaurants.

The Olympics Center itself is huge – but aging. It was built after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

The session lasted 3 hours. It was a bit exhausting, but interesting. There was lots and lots and lots of talk about diversity and disabilities. People could take out their smartphones and tablets, and using a QR code connect to a real-time Q&A system. They would periodically ask us to guess answers to questions, or ask our opinions about something, and the results would show up in histograms on the big front screen in real time. I wonder if there are systems like that in classrooms in the U.S. It’s certainly better than a show of hands count (there were 300 people in my session).

Here are some photos from the day. I don’t think I’ll hear back from them until March now about actual assignments, getting my accreditation card, and all the other stuff like my uniform and carrying bag.

It’s interesting being a part of it.

I’m a member of what is called the “Field Cast” – people who will go out in the field and help at events, help with athletes, and things like that. People who act as guides around the city and at stations are part of the “City Cast.”

I dreaded it when they asked me if I had a Japanese driver’s license, because I said yes, but I have a really bad sense of direction. They said, “That’s no problem – the cars all have navigation systems.” I really don’t want to get involved with driving around Tokyo in the middle of the Olympics though! I think something dealing with language help, media, or tech stuff might be better for me.

I also noticed on the events map that a large number of events are actually going to be practically within walking distance of my house! So it’s going to be a madhouse regardless.

Anyway, it should be something interesting to look back on later!

Click on individual photos to see them in full size.

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In an unrelated side-note, I keep wondering these days where to post things. I love my blog and have been using it for years. My friends and other people can search, and the content is mine, and it doesn’t fall into the FaceBook abyss. But not everybody is subscribed to it.

It’s somewhat easier to post to FaceBook, but everything there is fleeting. And I have some friends who aren’t subscribed to FaceBook either. I noticed that some non-FaceBook friends use Instagram, so recently I’ve started posting photos to that site, though I’m not crazy about the system. It does automatically post the same photos to FaceBook, so that way I can easily reach two sets of friends: FaceBook and Instagram users. Instagram is weird in the way it formats photos though, especially if you take some in portrait mode and some in landscape.

Some friends don’t use either social network, and only read my blog. While some read more than one so they get duplicate photos.

I guess I’ll just continue the way I am now – maybe use my blog more and just add links to FaceBook, to keep things going. But I used to post more Monta photos to my blog, and tend to post them to Instagram now.

I do promise to keep my political posts for the upcoming election separate though. I started a separate blog just for that: https://unitednewsreports.com/ Feel free to subscribe there as well.