+ First trip to Tokyo: Shibuya & Shinjuku!

I am back with more updates about my stay in Japan! ^^

I am sorry it´s late again >.< Since school started properly over here, time has been limited!

Anyway, I wanted to take you back to the time when I first arrived, just a bit under a month ago.

The very second day we stayed here (around the 5th of September?), I and a classmate decided to head into Tokyo to explore a bit! Now, she is a "Japan-veteran" (as in, she has been to Japan on several occations, and even studied here for a longer period of time also!), she took on the job of showing me around a bit (something I am very greatful for ^^).

Ofcourse, we were both pretty jet-lagged after the long journey, so I acctually requested that we´d visit Shibuya and Shinjuku on the first day (satuday) because I wanted to be a bit more sprightly for such an endeavour as going to Harajuku. 

So yeah, we somehow managed to find the way to the local train-station, and figured out how to read the map of train-routes that was exclusively written in kanji (ehehe ^^"), and soon we were on our way, with the 12 o´clock train!

It takes about 1 hour and 45 min to go the entire way to Shibuya from where we started off, so we had to change trains a few times, and spent a lot of time people-viewing while we did so! ^^

When we finally came there, we had gone by the Yamanote-line from Tokyo-mainstation, so we arrived just by the Hachiko-exit in Shibuya! This meant we came right out into the famous Shibuya-square as soon as we left the train-station.

(We were quite surprised to see a cat lying on the famous Hachiko statue haha ^^)

Our main goal in Shibuya was to explore "Maru-kyu" (or Shibuya 109 as the building says), so we headed there first.

I was so baffled by the fact that this shopping-mall has 8 floors exclusively for clothing and cute accessories, so I took quite a few pictures!

 

 The brand "Ruby-Rose" was sooo cuuute ;V; 

 

 

 

 Little Twin-stars stuff at the Hello-Kitty shop TT 0 TT

 

 We laughed a bit by the name of this store haha ^^

 

Liz-Lisa <3

I am not sure how much time we spent just walking around and looking, but it surely was well over an hour, perhaps two haha... Since we are both students and since we both had just arrived, none of us bought anything. We decided to spend the day browsing and just enjoying the views ^^

After leaving "Maru-kyu", we walked around some more, visited the local Forever 21 and a huuuge CD and DVD shop that had 9 floors, that also had a floor exclusively for manga! It was my first meeting with a so-called typical Japanese manga-shop and the share amount of manga kind of blew my mind!

After this we decided to head over to Shinjuku for a while! By then, it was already starting to get a bit late acctually.

The Yamanote-line is a circle line that goes around all the "famous" places in Tokyo, and the trains are marked with their green colour, so they are pretty easy to find ^^ We took it onwards a few stops to get to Shinjuku!

We had originally planned to visit the makeup store "E-tude-house" in Shinjuku, since my friend knew about a shop nearby the trainstation, but it happend to have moved, so we were a bit bummed by that, especially since we spent some time searching...

after a while though, we decided to get some dinner, and since I was "the new one there" I was able to choose! ^^ We tried out this thing called "Okonomiyaki"! 

Basically, the resturant you enter has tables with a hot-plate in the middle. You order some base ingredients from a menu, and you can order an extra with it. 

I went with a vegetable mix with an extra egg, and my friend did a chicken and cheese mix (but we split both)

 As you can see, it´s then up to you to fry the "pancake-omelette" by yourself (calling it that because that sort of is how it seems? haha)

 

Afterwards, you add some toppings (my friend tought me how to do it properly) and then it´s ready! ^^ It was a really fun experience to make it and personally I think it´s a really nice idea! 

When we had finished, we decided that perhaps it was time to head back home again. We both wanted to stop by Starbucks first though, so we headed out into the street to search for one close by.

While we did so, we happend to stumble upon a game arcade!

 

We didn´t play any crane-games, but we did try out a drumming game that was really fun ^^ I didn´t take any pictures of that though, I was too distracted by the amazingly cute korohamus *v*
One day....

Finally, we found a Starbucks-place, and I knew exactly what I wanted to try.

What can you find only in the Japan - Starbucks?

Matcha-Frappuchinos ♡ 7 ♡!
(they drew a cute little frog for me ahhh ; v; hihi)

So, with both a frappuchino each (my friend got vanilla-flavoured), we decided it was time to head home.
It had been a looong day, and we were both quite tired still from jet-lag.
We also had quite a schedule the next day (planning to go to Harajuku and everything) so we decided it was a good idea to try and get some sleep. 

I´ll let you in on a secret though, I was SO jet-lagged I could hardly sleep for 4-5 days @_@...

Yeah,

well, that was my first experience with Tokyo! ^^ SO many first-time-achievements were done that day! I visited Shibuya and Shinjuku for the first time, I saw a lot of well known brand-stores for the first time, I visited my first manga-shop, I tasted "Okonomiyaki" for the first time (haven´t since acctually), I visited and played a game at a game-arcade and I even tried a Matcha-Frappuchino! I truly felt like I could cross of loads of things from my mental-checklist haha ^^

I hope you enjoyed this entry!
Please comment below if you have any questions
or just want to say something!

On my new adventure: Arriving in Japan!

It has been a long while since I have been able to write. Mostly due to my summer job, but lately also because I had to pack and arrange everything properly for my exchange–student program that started this september! As many of you might know, I am studying for a bachelors degree in Japanese language at the university of Oslo! And as a part of that, it is mandatory to spend 5 months in an exchange–student program in Japan! ^^ (not complaining haha)

Well, I have been in Japan for a couple of weeks by now (I arrived on friday the 4th of September), so I thought it was time to write a bit about my adventures this far! (I am sorry it has taken so long >.<)

Leaving Norway, I and four other students from my class took the same route to Japan:
We flew to the Helsinki airport from Oslo, and onwards to the Narita airport in Japan. It is the longest time I have ever spent in an airplane, so it was really exciting for me! I could hardly sleep at all, even though I had been traveling since the middle of the night on the day before, and had to travel well 24 hours in total to reach my goal! It was my first time on that kind of an airplane, so I was really excited about there being screens to watch movies and stuff hehe ;v;
I saw a chinese movie (with subtitles) called "20 once again", it was a really nice one so I would definitely reccomend it! ^^

 

 

 

 

Arrived in Japan, we were met by some representatives from our designated international university, and we waited with them for a couple of hours before the school bus came to pick us up, to go to Josai International university. There we got a quick briefing about things, before we were handed our apartment keys, and drove off by the same bus to our new living places! 

The place I live is situated in the country-side, so I guess you could call it a sort of village or small town. It´s called Tógane, and it lies in the county of Chiba, just over 1 hour by train to the Tokyo main-station. I have lived in the countryside most of my life so I really didn´t mind being situated here. In the past couple of weeks I have come to find Tógane to be a rather calm and charming town.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quite tranquil, isn´t it?

And about the apartment: it is surprisingly big! I must say, it is quite bigger than the place I used to live in, in Oslo! But then again, in Oslo I only had my own sleeping room, while I had to share both bathroom and kitchen. Here in Japan I have an entire apartment, with both kitchen and bathrooms. 

I took a few pictures when I had just arrived and packed out my suitcase.

 

It was so nice, because upon arrival, we got this really big care–package with everything we could possibly need for starting out living in the apartments. I won´t mention everything, but amongst other things there was a few towels, toilet-paper, bedding and bed cover, tableware, soaps and even some really cute slippers! You could say it was a really nice experience over all hehe.

Well, as I have been living here for almost two weeks, I can mention that the first week was just a general orientation week. We had a few sessions at our school with information about this and that, and also we attended the opening ceremony last friday, but the first week was generally a week off so we could pretty much do what we wanted. I used the time to go to Tokyo as much as three times, both the first and second day (since it was a weekend) and also the following wednesday! I had quite a few adventures, including getting really ill and fever–ish due to jet-lag,
but I think I´ll save that for my next updates ;-)

I hope you enjoyed this update about my current living-situation!

I´m still quite excited about everything, and even though I´ve only been here about two weeks it feels like months allready! wow!

Please stay tuned!