Moving In
So I just moved into my new apartment in Izumi Chuo, Sendai, Miyagi, Japan~
I arrived at Narita airport on Friday. After a very, very long flight. We, my friend Alex and I, went via Dubai. All in all, it took us around 20 hours to get from the airport in Germany to the airport in Japan. You can imagine how exhausted we were.
We crashed at Khaosan Tokyo Annex hostel in Asakusa. Originally we had wanted to move on to Sendai right away, but then we arrived on a Friday and after we'd already bought our tickets we were informed that we couldn't move in during the weekend. So two nights in Tokyo it was.
Ultimately, we were too tired to do much. Which is not that bad considering that we've already spent some time sightseeing in Tokyo in 2010 and we've got a whole year ahead of us. On Saturday we went up the Tokyo government building. It's higher than the Tokyo Tower and access is free. I reccommend it. (It's located in Shinjuku, not so far from the JR West Exit) Have some pictures I took 2010.
Because it was raining heavily, after that we just took a stroll around Ikebukuro. While I was standing around Ikebukuro train station looking into my Japan guidebook, a random Japanese guy (college student age) chatted me up, totally looking to test out his mad English skills. He and his friend ended up taking us to Sunshine City, because apparently, his mad English skills weren't good enough to explain the way. He switched to Japanese pretty quickly after he got that, yeah, I do speak the language. A little. For a while I thought Alex and I weren't going to get rid of them anymore.
When we were done with Sunshine City we took a look around Ikebukuro's Animate flag store. I was excited about the news that Kimi to Boku is going to be animated, even though I still haven't gotten around to catching up with the manga. Also, they had really cool Hetalia language teaching books. For German, English and...Spanish if I remember correctly. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna end up buying the German one.
After that we went back to the hostel. And man, did we have the worst night ever. We had booked into an 8 people mixed room, because nothing else was free... and this one guy was just SNORING like nothing I've ever heard. After 3 or 4 hours of trying to sleep to that background noise I gave up, climbed out of my bed and tried to wake the guy up (because pretty much no one else but him was sleeping), and he just sort of opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling for a couple seconds looking stoned. He didn't even notice me. But he stopped snoring so I went back to bed. Two minutes later the noise started up again. RAGE.
I think I woke him around 4 more times that night without any success. Alex wasn't sleeping either. The guy finally stopped at around 5 or 6 in the morning, and I fell asleep, only to wake up around two hours later because someone new had shown up and taken the empty bed behind me. And the new guy was snoring, too. Could not f'cking believe it.
So Sunday we spent most of the day just walking around Asakusa, feeling like zombies.
Oh and we made a little trip to Akihabara where I bought a cute little chocobo figure for just 50yen.
We took the Willer Night Express from Tokyo to Sendai that night. When you access their site from outside of Japan, you can buy bus passes for 10.000+ yen that can be used on 3, 4 or 5 non consecutive days in a period of three months. Cheaper than the Shinkansen, but also a lot less comfortable. We had 'relax seats' and well... not so relaxing at all. Despite their offer for foreigners, they're also not very foreigner friendly. After getting to their center and checking in, I did not hear or read a word of English anywhere. So, if you don't speak Japanese, expect to be confused. I was. (And that after 2 and a half years of studying Japanese at college. OTZ )
We left Tokyo at 11:30 PM and arrived at Sendai Station at 6:20 AM. (We also drove through Fukushima. Can you believe their train station says 'Power City' ? ).
We couldn't move into our apartments until 9:30, so we spent a lot of time just sitting around in a McDonald's at Sendai Station, trying not to fall asleep after two nights of virtually no sleep. (And carrying around very heavy luggage). I was so happy when I finally got the key to my apartment... It's wonderful to have a place to store and unpack your suitcases. The aprtment is about as large as the one I had in Germany, so no complaints there. Although it's more expensive. And Sendai is pretty cold at the moment. (There's a typhoon raging outside and I'm writing this) And I'm too much of a cheapskate to turn on the air conditioning. Oh well.
Yesterday after moving in we immediately had to go to campus to get a whole lot of papers and stuff about choosing our courses and so on... none of which we understand really, because there's too many Kanji. We're having some Japanese friends help us with that tomorrow, though. Then we also had to do a sort of health check, but since we're exchange students, we didn't have to go through all of it, thankfully. Just taking our weight / heigt and and some x-rays. I honestly don't know why they even bothered.
Today we went shopping for groceries and some other essential stuff. Japan is expensive. I get the feeling that everything costs about three times as much as it doesn in Germany. Good thing there's a 100yen shop right outside our apartment building. I guess I'll be going there a lot.
We also heard a lot about taking earthquake precautions and such. The international...something... foundation gave us free flashlight-radios that run without batteries and muffins in a can that are supposed to be good for five years. I feel so save now.
I'll post some more pictures next time. That's all for now, I think. I'm tired.