Studera utomlands

After a long ~14-hour flight, I finally landed in Tokyo!

First Weekdays

After spending too much time dealing with my SIM card, I finally left the airport by metro. Taking the metro in Japan, and listening to the stop announcements on the way was really an experience on its own~

It took over an hour to get to my student accommodation while pulling around 2 luggages, but I managed! I arrived around 6 pm, checked in, and was shown to my room. It was raining that evening, so I didn’t get to explore but luckily there was a restaurant and convenience store (konbini) just downstairs where I could get dinner.

The next day, I ran some errands. I got a haircut and then some essentials from Daiso. Daiso is a dollar store where nearly everything in the store is 100 yen (7 SEK), so you can buy a lot of things with not that much money. I highly recommend it to anyone visiting Japan!

On Wednesday, I went to the university for the first time. I met my supervisor and people at the lab, I was given desk space and another exchange student in the lab showed me around campus 😀

Thursday was spent setting up my UTokyo accounts and access to servers. While Friday was for settling paperwork (I’ll detail these in another post).

The Weekend

All in all, it was not a busy week for my project at all. On the weekend, I was able to explore my surroundings and the nearby city, Ikebukuro. Ikebukuro is just a 30-minute walk from my student accommodation and I decided to visit the closest temple on my way there too!

I passed by a mall that I decided to enter and stumbled across a cosplay event. I had never seen so many cosplayers in one place before, and I felt super out of place in my normal wear, which was a first! They were gathered outside, and several were taking pictures with photographers. I walked through the crowd and was a bit overwhelmed by the number of people, but it was really fun to see!

And that was my first week! Quite an eventful start 😀 Unfortunately, I got sick the whole week afterwards which toned everything down, but that’s another story XP

In my next post, I’ll talk about the practical stuff around going on exchange, so see you soon!

Introduction image: View of Mount Fuji from the plane. Picture by: Yi Cheng Chng