City days, orientation and 居酒屋！

Some days have passed and so many things have happened I don't really know where to begin and what of these things actually make any sense to you. But let's try something!

So a week back I had time to stroll around by myself over the weekend - this meant heading to Shinjuku and Harajuku (with a quick visit to Shibuya). I don't have much to particularly say about these trips but I snapped a couple of photos for your entertainment!

So that maybe captures at least something of the atmosphere over the weekend. Saturday was absolutely melting hot back then - the temperature lingered around 30 the whole day and for my Nordic nature that was really a tough heat to survive in! All the other pictures are from Shinjuku apart from the picture on the right top corner where you can see some of the crowd in Harajuku from Sunday. What was a nice surprise on Saturday evening in Shinjuku was when I was already heading back to the station and towards home and happened to stumble accross a little matsuri - a festival. Food, drinks and some live music! So I stayed for a while, listened to the band playing (they were actually really great!) before finally heading back home to Koenji with my dead feet. And if my feet were dead after Saturday, they were certainly killed on Sunday in Harajuku. Next time I consider going to Harajuku on the weekend (especially on Sunday), somebody please hit me in the face...

Monday (21st of September) was an interesting day then because it meant the first time I visited the campus of our university! First we were supposed to meet up early in the morning in order to go to the ward office and get some official registration things done but since the office was closed due to holidays, we ended up just heading to Yotsuya and having some lunch together. The food was delicious and the company even better! 

After some delicious food we then headed to the campus. And... wow. Just wow. It is big. Huge. Massive. As a person who's home campus consists of one building with 3 floors where we have classrooms in two and cafeteria at the ground floor, the Yotsuya campus is just enormous. The caampus area consists of numerous (I'm going to say 12 but don't bet on it) buildings with floors after floors after floors. I was saying that probably my first days will be spent running around like a headless chicken, trying to find the right building and classroom...

We had a really nicely organised orientation that took some two or so hours, during which we were told about some principles and policies at the school as well as how to do our course registrations. After that we met with our tutors that were assigned to us. We had a little walk around campus before then heading home finally after an exciting day in order to catch some sleep before Tuesday's welcome ceremony. 

The ceremony on Tuesday then involved.. speeeches, lots of exchange students and food. There are alltogether some 230 of us exchange students (just to compare - that's about the amount of STUDENTS we have in our university..) from 40 different countries. During the welcome ceremony I talked to people at least from France, Germany, Poland, Denmark, USA and Mexico. After the actual ceremony people then split to continue the party in variety of places - I ended up joining a group too and we headed to a izakaya in Yotsuya. An 居酒屋 is a pub sort of a place for casual after-work (or uni) drinking with a little food service. So we paid a little fee and with that got ourselves drinks and food and let me just tell you - these people certainly did know how to have a good time! The desibel levels were something that probably would have required earplugs in a longer run. However I had a good time and certainly hope to participate in more of these sorts of events! 

In the above picture - my first try at Japanese bear at the izakaya as well as some sushi just to give an example what sorts of little foods we got with our drinks. The bottom picture is then my lunch from Monday. 

Now I think my post is starting to run marathon legnths and I don't have much else to say, so I'll cut it here for now and tell about today's little adventures in rainy Ikebukuro a bit later. In case you have anything on your mind that I forgot to tell or you got curious about, feel free to ask - here or fb, anything goes!

Until next time! Greetings from rainy Tokyo.