Campus Orientation and Shinjuku

What ive been posting is from the pictures I took last week and ive been trying hard to catch up but its been difficult, so I decided to post a real recent lot of pictures and just catch up on the others later.

Yesterday I went with some friends to Shinjuku (thats the busiest station in the world, 4 million through it every day), and we went to a restaurant. It was really fun and we just ordered lots of plates and shared it. This is some of the food:



The plate on the right is like a Japanese pancake, but with noodles meat and cheese :).

Anyway today was more interesting, I had my first Japanese class and orientation. I ended up being put into class 2 (theres 1A, 1B, 1C, 2, 3, 4, 5) so its between beginners and intermediate. We have 14 hours of lessons a week, and tomorrow I have classes (all japanese language classes) from 9 till 3.

>>Its a little off track but I wanted to meet more Japanese people so I signed up for a F.A.C.E (dunno what it stands for) programme, where you get paired with another Japanese student and can do whatever you want basically. People who run this were at the orientation too and talking to them was very fun (there are a lot of bored students who like foriengers and a lot of housewives who are bored with staying at home). I get to meet my new friend tomorrow afternoon!

Anyway after Japanese class we were taken around the campus which took about an hour. Heres the famous akamon (red in Japanese) gate :



Anyway during the orientation I made a new friend (the student host) who is going to take me drinking shouchu (like Japanese Vodka) and Karaoke!

After that a few of us went to a japanese tea room and had some drinks. I met a girl here too and got her number (sitting opposite me), so i've made lots of friends today which is really good!



(theres me on the left. This was about the 5th photo because we were getting the old Japanese guy to take it and he kept cutting me off! so thats my excuse for not smiling properly!)

Anyway something we looked at a few days ago was a shop called Tanaka fruit. Its like super expensive fruit for people with lots of money. All the fruit was laied out like a jewelery shop.

Heres 2 mangos that were sold as a set: (yes, just mangos)



And to anyone that says fruit isnt expensive in Japan (read:mum!), heres some proof (given its an expensive shop in the middle of Shinjuku), but these mangoes are being sold for 42,000 Yen, which is about $500 NZD.

Yes . For Mangos.

Anyway its late here and I have to get up at 7 am to get the train (which takes an hour) to get to language class in time)

Ja ne!

Shibuya

This is just a quick post about Shibuya, its about 5min from where I live which is really good because its one of the Hubs of youth in Tokyo. Quite a lot of movies have been filmed on the main intersection too which is crazy when its busy. It has lots of shops and skyscrapers everywhere. I went up to the top of one of the buildings with a friend (where the fast & furious was filmed) and took some pictures:
(Shibuya is the place me and friends often go to for dinner or shopping)

Odaiba Part 2

Ok so last time I left it half way through Odaiba. After we left Venus Fort, we went across to the Toyota showcase building (I think its called that). It has a lot of cool new Toyota cars etc. Here are some pictures from the entrance. Theres a huge road that winds through the building, that ou can test drive the new cars on. I saw some japanese families in them and they weren't actually touching thedriving wheel so i'm guessing its an automated ride.



We spent a few hours here, down stairs they have big shows on hybrid technology which was cool, and a large racing simulator (like a ride at rainbows end). We had to queue up a little but it was cool when we got in, it was like a racing game but the seats were elevated off the ground and moved with the car.

>>Also a side note on queuing - the Japanese do it everywhere, so far ive seen Train queues (thats ok I think), Queues to use the toilets, showers, even a 30min queue to use the fitting room at a clothes shop! Yesterday when we were walking around I saw a new pastry shop had opened, the queue was right around the block, several hours long! The Japanese love to queue up for new things apparently.

Heres a cool new type of car they were demonstrating too, a bit like a single person get around thing, looked cool anyway:



So next we left the Toyota rooms, and went into a shopping complex (still Odaiba). This one had ots of floors and each floor was a different thing. One floor had a lot of old Japanese things, and one an was selling beetles!! I thought they weren't real to start with, but they were! freeky! Apparently Japanese kids like to have them as pets and to get the to fight each others. They were really big (maby 10-15cm), and only 500Yen each (about $6 NZ).



After that we went out side and had some food, I looked around the soy showcase room which I forgot to take pictures in, but they just had all their latest equipment on showcase and how much it was etc.

Outside in Odaiba they have a replica of the Statue of Liberty too so I had to photograph that!
Also a random photo of the bridge that connects Odaiba to the mainland.



It was starting to get late, so we headed back into Tokyo mainland. Tims parents left and we decided to walk around some of the streets. Heres the small street we walked down that had lots of fish stalls and random shops:



An interesting stall I found was a shoe one, and the random designs and colors they had (Japaneses youth wear crazy clothes)



And a fruit shop, so you can see the prices: (fruit is generally pretty expensive here, except for bananas Ive found - and a $200 mango which i'll post next time)



>>This is for wayne - there were heaps of machines where you could play to try pick up soft toys, I found a couple that had super huge toys!



Not much more to post from Odabi so thats it for now!

Odaiba Part 1

I went with a friend from New Zealand and his parents to Odaiba, which is the large part of land off Tokyo's port which is all reclaimed land, and has some huge buildings on it.

Before that I thought i'd post some random pictures i've taken of the area about my lodge. Its robally the a more surburban type area of Tokyo.

This is my lodge's lounge, its not much but nice place to meet the other new students:


Heres the crossing to the train tracks:



This is the street just before the train station:


Oks, so Odaiba! I was being taken around buy this group:

Thats Barry, Mum, and Tim.

First we walked to a shopping mall called `Venus Fort` (they have really weird names here) - this mall has a roof that changes depending on the weather outside which is pretty cool. Heres the welcome sign - waiting for next time!



And heres what the roof looked like from inside (it was sunny outside):



And the place is full of touristy type expensive brand shops:



and a hat shop!



After looking at a few of the shops, we decided to get some food. We got Japanese style omletes, which are made with rice and noodles and sauces and some meat. It was a lot nicer than it sounded/looked! I forgot to get a picture of them even thou I told myself I was going to 1min before they came out, but heres a picture of the restaurant! (it was a large shared table)

After that we looked through he Toyota show room, which was just historic things, I got some cool photos of the cars, and a random wall with this written on it which I didn't quite understand (but you get that a lot here):



After that we decided to have a look at the 'chair of happiness',　which promised:

And, heres me on the chair of happiness!:

After that moment of feeing slightly cheesy we decided to leave and to go check out the Toyota showcase building, which had all their latest designs and things. I'll put that in another post cause theres heaps more pictures and I want to get this one up.

The subways!

Ok so I left off talking about the scary crows and my little room, now for my adventures down the road!

The place I am staying is Komaba lodge which is at the very bottom of the Komaba Campus II on Tokyo. Despite the size of the room it's actually a really nice place because its very close to the main areas of Tokyo. The big one is Shibuya which is only 2mins on the train. I don't think I've mentioned the trains before so thats probably a good thing to talk about first:



Tokyo has a huge train system, there are so many train and subway stations its hard to even explain them, I think the most daunting thing for me at first was the train and subway system. Mainly because a lot of the maps are only in japanese Kanji and not english, so knowing what lines to take and where to get off can be a problem. The picture above is of the entry to the smaller station that is very close to my lodge (its called 'komaba todaimae' which means in front of komaba university). There are gates that walk through that will ever register a card you are carrying or you can insert little tickets/cards into them.

If you try walk through without putting a ticket in or waving your card over the scanner (can scan through your wallet which is really cool) a red symbol flashes and the doors at the other end close shut. They change direction too which makes it really confusing in rush hour.

Once you get through the station gate it becomes a mission of following the colored signs that represent your 'line' (there are hundreds in tokyo, each one with 10-20 stations on it).


There are subways (which go several levels deep), and train stations. You have to be careful not to get them confused because they have different lines and are run by different companies.

The station at shinjuku I think is the largest here, is something like 1k long underground. It can be a long walk to transfer lines if you have to get from one side to the other!

At the subway once I also saw this pretty cool device to move books up stairs so I thought id post that too!

First few days

The first few days were pretty hard, I got homesick a lot and was still in quite a bit of shock from being in such a different place.

I took some pictures of my room, it's pretty small, and everything folds away. I have a bed and desk, and bathroom. The bath room sink rolls into the corner and makes a shower.

I have a little balcony which I've put a rope across to hang my washing on.

Its hard to understand the small size of the bathroom but I have to sit on the toilet on a funny angle because my knees are too wide for the room :(.

I've also met my neighbours, a Valentine from Bulgeria, and Manfreid from swizerland. They are both very nice and Valentine took me on the subway to the nearby suburb for lunch and showed me the supermarket.

Heres a picture from my balcony of the other rooms, there are a lot of rooms but I don't usually see the other students but there are a lot. Me and luke have made friends with about 5 other students (from switzerland, italy, columbia malasia) and have been going out to dinner together. Its helped a lot with no feeling so down because they are all in the same position to me (not knowing much japanese, very confused by the whole thing).





Something else I noticed is they have really big crows here, probably about 30cm long. They are freaky too because they are all black and have really big beaks. Reminds me of the scary crows from the wizard of oz. Didn't help someone telling me they have attacked and killed babies before because they were holding food. Anyway them don't seem to attack me, but they still freak me out in the morning when they sit outside my room and make the most unnatural sound I've heard from a bird.

The plane ride

I have been here for nearly a week now, and had heaps and heaps of photos/stories to tell, but no real way to put them online.

Finally got my own laptop so this ones going to be big, ill try sort it into days of what I've done.

First, my address:

4-6-29-K215 Komaba,
Meguro-ku,
Tokyo 153-0041,
The University of Tokyo,
Komaba Lodge

Landing

Heres the plane we flew on, it was pretty big inside, there were 4 rows with 3 seats each. We ended up sitting next to a Japanese high school girl who looked a lot older than she was! She spoke really good English too.

We thought the plane might be kind of empty too at the start but when we got to the departure area there was heaps of Japanese students!

The plane ride was pretty boring otherwise, they had heaps of movies to choose from so I ended up watching Eragon, Pursuit of Happiness, and some others that I can't remember right now.

When we landed customs was easy, they just wanted to know I had a passport, and then the JASSO people from the government gave us a little bit of money, and put us into taxis (ours ended up costing about 30,000 Yen, which is about 450 NZ$!).

I think the best picture I got during our taxi ride (which ended up taking about 3 hours) from Naritta airport to Tokyo was of Tokyo tower: