The first day went by like a summer breeze. No, not like the spring one which gently wraps around your face, stroking you gently on your cheeks, and kissing you a soft goodbye when going on to the next person. This felt like a short, intensive, yet luckily odourless fart into your face. More like whoaaaaa-what-was-that-and-where-has-it-gone.

I will skip all the fun I had while arriving to Japan on my month-long assignment (yeah, it included missing the flight, frenziedly trying to get a re-booking that would cost less than my liver, 2 kidneys, and both of my balls after my boss would find out, flying through half of the world, etc.) and go directly to the first day, which felt… actually quite good.

I woke up in my cute little hotel room – the room holds one table, one chair, one bed, one plastic bathroom, and the minimum possible space to allow movement between these four elements (which I am pretty sure that was designed with a “(sum of the area taken up by the furniture) +10%” approach).

The breakfast was a typical budget solution you would get for 515 JPY in the centre of Tokyo – fish, rice, some pickled veggies, radish, egg. I had to throw one angry look at the waiter when he was hesitating whether to give me natto or not (Nobody. Ever. Steals. My. Natto. From. Me), but ultimately he put on the table the package full of stinking beans (ahhh…) and we became friends. I finished it all, took a deep breath, and made the first step towards the journey that would be defining my life for the upcoming month or so.

Our Japan office is quite large. 30+ floor in a large building in the business centre of Tokyo, nice and smiling people that don’t look that much destroyed. I spent the first half of the day reading through some project materials and kick-off presentations, learning new fancy Oil&Gas expressions in Japanese, saying hi to people, and finishing some assignments – remnants from my European office. My manager, a 32-years young nice guy came to the office at 14:00 as he had to finish some things back at home and we went downstairs to eat lunch.

Kaisendon, rice bowl full of fresh seafood, is always a good choice. And it is even a better choice if you couple the kaisendon with two beers (finally someone who understands the awesomeness of drinking alcohol during day!) and a manager who among one of the first things he says is “To be honest, I am one of the top guys in our Japan office that does everything what one can do to work as less as possible”.

And no, this shouldn’t be understood in the Ayn Rand’s “a person without purpose, shame on you, you slacker!” kind of view, but more in the “I know what is efficient and what is not” kind of view.

I fell in love with the guy on the first sight.

I enjoyed every single bite of the meal we had – whether it was the juicy fish or the amazingly well-cooked rice with an excellent al dente feeling, quite unusual for a budgetty lunch place in the business district. After eating and discussing lives (as this was the last project this manager was supervising before moving to a different company, I was quite interested into what he wanted to do as his new steps), we spent the next hour or two preparing the structure for an internal meeting for the next day. For the remaining 5 hours, I worked on putting together the content from various materials while inserting some own insights I “felt” was OK.

More on “feeling” and Alain de Botton’s view on it later.

At eight I started to get impatient – the boss left, but I was still not sure if the stuff I have done was good enough. Well, I trying to blink blink it up (i.e. spend time on making a material look nicer while actually changing an expression or ten on the go) and when I looked up it was suddenly 22pm. The office was still buzzing with energy – people scheduling meetings on 22pm was not unusual and I told myself that “Yeah, why not”, so I asked a young group of consultants if I can join them for their “Summer internship coordination” meeting that was scheduled for 22:30. I took the “be open and suck it up!” approach and enjoyed watching a group of slightly tired 25-somethings discussing who was going to do what for the visiting interns in the upcoming days.

The group of slightly tired 25-somethings decided everything, we had a short discussion about life, and I went back to my place. There I met a different manager from our Singapore office. We talked a bit and after a while (it was around midnight) he said – “Hey, wanna join me for a short, 90 minute drink? I still have to return to the office to finish some stuff, but I want to have a beer first – my friend is visiting the town”.

“Yeah, sure!”

So there we go. A small Italian restaurant in Tokyo, the best white truffle risotto I have ever had (and risotto is on the few things I can be quite fussy about), or at least I have ever had at 1am in Tokyo downtown, great beer, and discussions about language acquisition, English accents, Japanese accents, strategy, and future of some of our operations.

I arrived back home at 2am, finished some things, and went to sleep few minutes before 3. The last thing my brain processed was the slight feeling of pain when I set up the alarm clock for 8:30.