First Day in Tokyo

Sorry for the lateness in getting any posts done on here!  I've been pretty busy!  But I have managed to find some time now!  This post is only really about the flight and first day of Japan, but I'll blog about the other couple of days that I've spent here so far soon too!

So we were up at about half past four in the morning on Saturday the 27th of August, and set off an hour later to go to Manchester Airport with Mum, Dad and Ayu.  We got there at about 6 o'clock, and went to one of the Etihad check-in desks, where we met Ash.  After having a major rearrangement of my hand luggage, as it was both too big and too heavy to take on (as if they weigh hand luggage now!) I went to check my main luggage, to find it was 2kg too heavy.  £54 overweight fees later we were ready to go through the security checks and onto the plane.  As my parents and Ayu couldn't go any further, in front of the security gate was the scene of the teary goodbye I had been dreading.  Unsurprisingly, it was as bad as I'd expected it to be.  

Yes, I'm smiling there, but you have to for the camera!

I was pretty much crying whilst going through security right after saying the final goodbye, and other people in there were giving me a sort of "what's wrong with him? He's going on holiday!" look.  If only they knew!

After security we had about 15 minutes to wait before going to our gate and then getting on the plane.  Ohh, the plane. Oh dear.  Whilst the service and interactive screens we all got were good, the seats were terrible!  I've never had so little legroom on a long haul flight.  I couldn't have my legs straight, so I had cramp in my legs and achey pains in my knees because they'd been bent for so long by the time I disembarked the plane.  It was seven hours to Abu Dhabi, before we had a two hour stop over, and then the final ten hour flight on to Tokyo.  It was long, cramped, and horrible, but eventually we were there.

We arrived at about 1 o'clock in the afternoon at Tokyo Narita Aiport, actually in neighbouring Chiba (oops, I initially wrote 'in neighbouring China' by accident there, that would have been a long transfer), and booked a seat on a bus from the Airport to Kichijoji, in Western Tokyo.  It was my first chance to authentically use Japanese, and it went well!  I was pleased that we could actually understand each other!

The trip was about an hour and a half, during which time Ash and I shared an iPod and admired the Tokyo scenery.  It initially struck me as being very similar to Shanghai, as the highways around the centre are very similar, as are some of the tall buildings, and blocks of flats, but once you get into the centre the two are quite different.  

Arriving in Kichijoji, we easily found the train station, before buying a Suica Card (like an Oyster card it allows you to top it up with credit in order to travel the trains around Tokyo and Japan) and taking the Chuo Rapid Line three stops to Higashi-Koganei, the closest station to my guesthouse.  

Once in Higashi-Koganei, I used a nearby payphone to phone the guesthouse company, who came and picked us up, and took us to the Big Rose 21 guesthouse.  I signed the forms needed, paid my first month's rent and deposit, and then went up to the room to relax.  My accommodation is brilliant, and I'll have a proper post about it when I've finished setting up here.

That evening we were too tired to really do anything, so we had a look at some Japanese TV, went to buy a bento box for dinner and a couple of beers, before going to bed!  Ash has been staying with me for a few days (he's leaving tomorrow to travel around the Kansai region of Kyoto and Osaka, before heading down to his university in Fukuoka), and the guesthouse people were good enough to set up a futon on my floor for him to sleep on!

Oh, and I bought a little plant for my room as well.  His name is Albert Henry, and he is lovely.

I'll try post soon about my first few days in Japan!  Please stay tuned, my blog should actually be interesting from now on!!

Hope England's coping without me.

James

I'm in Japan!

Woo!  So here I am, sitting in my new room at Big Rose 21 with Ash, watching some very strange Japanese TV with an Asahi and a hot bento box.

In the next day or two I'll post a proper post about my trip so far...plenty to talk about!  But just for now, I'm here, and very very happy indeed :)

Stay tuned!

James

Tomorrow I Leave For Japan

Yes, it's come.  It's been a few years in the making, but the time has finally come.  Early tomorrow morning, my parents and Ayu will take me to Manchester Airport to meet Ash, and then the two of us will fly on to Tokyo.

My bag is (nearly!) packed, the goodbyes have been said, I've been out for a last drink at The Junction with Mum, Dad and Ayu.  All that is left to do now is have The Last Supper.  I requested a full roast, with chicken, roast potatoes, Yorkshire pudding, stuffing, cabbage and gravy.  As usual, Mum has delivered and I can smell it now; it smells delicious.

It's been a strange day.  I've felt a mixture of excitement, nerves, and sadness.  Ayu came over at about 9 this morning, and we've been out to shop for some last bits and bobs, had my passport photos taken, as required by ICU, put some money in my account, had my hair cut, packed most of my bag, and printed off some photos of us to take.  

After dinner we'll hopefully have a relaxing evening after such a hectic day, as well as pack the last few things into my suitcase.  

This will be my last post in England, so the next time you hear from me on here will be from Tokyo!  I look forward to seeing some of you in Japan, but most of you next year...have a good one!  I'll be on Facebook (most of the time, as ever) so I look forward to being able to keep in touch with the people who are important to me!

For now, goodbye; speak to you from Tokyo!

James

Things I'll Miss

It's getting really close to my departure now, and a sad trip to say good bye to my grandparents today has prompted me to write this blog post.

I drove over to see them at their house in Wilberfoss, near York, with Ayu this morning.  After arriving, I got my laptop out and showed them some photos from China last year (I have seen them since then, but the photos just never came out!).  We sat, chatted, and had a bit of a catch up, before going out for a pub lunch.  I had steak & ale pie with chips and peas. Yum.  Speaking of things I'll miss, pub food will definitely be one of them!  Not that I have it often(...), but I'm guessing steak & ale pie hasn't really caught on in Japan!  That said, there is a British Pub in Kichijoji, near to my Guesthouse, which Miles writes about in his blog here.  I'd really like to have a look at that when I'm there.  Obviously I don't want to be one of those Britons who just hangs out in the western-style places when they're abroad, but I'd like to have a look at their take on our culture.  I'll probably blog about it too, heh. 

Anyways, back to my grandparents.  After we returned from the pub, we had a snooze before my drive home, because I haven't been sleeping well recently, like not getting to sleep until 3 or 4 in the morning (at least it'll make the jet lag more bearable!), and on top of that, the heavy pie just put me to sleep.  After we woke up, we had a little photoshoot in the garden, (believe it or not, the one here was the best of the bunch), and my grandma gave me this beautiful gold crucifix to keep me safe in Japan.

She's had it since she was around 20, and my dad remembers her wearing it when he was a kid, so it's got a lot of family sentimental value - I'd better take good care of it!

So aside from just missing my grandparents (and pub grub), today made me think about all the things I'm going to miss during my year abroad.

One of the hardest things will be saying good bye to my girlfriend, Ayu.  After meeting at school when she joined the sixth form in 2009 and being together since the start of 2010 (January 18th!), we've spoken to each other literally every day, in some form or another, whether it be a text or two, emailing, speaking on the phone, Skype, or spending the whole day together. 

We naturally intend to keep this track record up whilst I'm in Japan, but the relationship will obviously much harder.  It really gets me down sometimes, thinking about how long we'll spend apart.  A lot of the time at the moment, I'm really split in my mind about going to Japan.  Half of me really looks forward to it, and just wants to get on the next plane out and go and experience everything, but the other half of me is hesistant about going at all, and counting down the days I have left with Ayu.  It's currently three, and writing this is killing me inside.  I keep thinking forward and imagining Friday afternoon; us both knowing that this is going to be the last real time we'll spend together for such a long time, and I get upset every time I do think about it.  I know I shouldn't dwell, but it's so hard not to.  

As I went to Leeds University from last September, we stopped being able to see each other every day, as we had done when we were at school together, but we still saw each other every weekend, and the odd week day, too.  You'd have thought that that would make preparing for a year in Japan easier, but it really hasn't, especially considering that I've again got used to seeing her every day over the Summer.  I can't say how I'll feel once I'm in Japan; it hasn't really hit me fully that we'll be apart for a whole year, but I don't think I'll do too well.  We'll have to see. 

I know that this opportunity to go to Japan to study and live only really comes once in a lifetime, so I should fully embrace it.  I'm sure that once I get there I'll settle in and it won't be too bad.  Ayu and I will be Skyping every week, and emailing every day, even if they're just short emails, so that should take the edge of it and make it more bearable.  As she's going to Imperial College London to read Maths from October, she'll have a lot on her plate too, so it's going to be a very exciting time for both of us, even if we aren't together.

I will miss my parents, too.  All the little things from when I'm living at home that I don't appreciate fully.  Like waking up every morning to find a cup of tea next to my bed (usually cold, but that's because me and waking up don't get along very well), the little gifts my dad buys for me from Covent Garden or Camden Town when he goes down to London for business, and just having them always there for me to talk to.

In the case of my grandparents, Ayu, my parents, and everyone else I'll be missing, I have to remember that they'll all still be here for me when I get back, and that a year really isn't a long time.  I just have to remain positive!  I'm taking plenty of little momentos from home to Japan, which will help me keep connected a little bit more (or horrendously homesick, I don't know yet).  

I feel bad for writing so much more about missing Ayu than my parents and grandparents, but the majority of what I wrote about missing Ayu is completely applicable to my parents and grandparents, too, especially imagining the last day I'll spend with my parents, and the drive to the airport, and  leaving everyone behind; going through the barrier at Manchester Airport and realising that I won't see them again for so long. It's true for all my family and friends whom I saw at the weekend, for my leaving party, too.  Everyone will be missed.

Today I also bid a last good bye to Punty, my faithful Fiat Punto in (British racing) green.

I got him (yes him, not it) for Christmas back in 2009 and, despite the brake down-y strops he occasionally throws, I will miss him massively.  My insurance runs out tomorrow morning, so tonight was the last time I will ever drive him, when I took Ayu home from my house.  He probably won't last the year when I'm in Japan, because I'm the only one who uses him and when I wasn't driving him during my exams and study leave, for just a few months, his condition deteriorated a bit, so we might as well sell him to someone who'll use him regularly, because he works really well when being driven every day, it's just a problem once he's been sat outside my house at the mercy of the elements for weeks at a time.  But because of this, Punty is the one thing that won't be here waiting for me when I get back from Japan :(

Ah, tea.  In Japan you will be sorely missed.  Green tea is all well and good, but you really can't beat a good cup of Yorkshire Tea with milk and one sugar.  I'm going to take 100 teabags with me, and Mum's promised to send me more throughout the year!  I just really hope you can actually get milk in Japan, unlike China, where I took a load of teabags with me only to find that all I could have milk-wise was UHT; it's just not the same!  So if I do get milk, I obviously won't be missing tea!  But without milk, it will be a very painful withdrawal indeed!

I'll also miss my nice big comfy sofa, also pictured to the right (a bit of it, anyway).  I'll miss all the nice furnishings in my house, as well as the house itself!  I'll miss the garden, with the never ending supply of green beans it keeps producing.  I'll miss my pond, with Bert and Alf (the two terrapins), and the gold fish. 

I'll miss my two dogs, Nobby and Mabel too, but what I'll miss most of all is arriving back home after being somewhere and simply being at home.  Everything is familiar, everything is, well, home.  

Nobby

Mabel

But all of the above is not to say I'm not looking forward to Japan.  I really, really, really am.  Preparation is moving swiftly, as it has been doing all week.  This evening I drove up to Leeds Bradford Airport to collect my Yen.  

That's a lot of money!  I'm sure I'll burn through it in the first few days of being there, though.  An interesting observation of how Travelex regard their money was the bag in which the yen came, before the woman took them out to count and give to me.  They were in a transparent polythene bag with some white boxes on to write in, a bit like the Sainsbury's freezer bag in my last post.  One of the boxes was titled 'Currency', and underneath someone had scribbled "Jap Cash".  Surely just "Yen" would have done, Travelex?

Anyways, I think that's quite enough writing for now.  Off into Leeds tomorrow for some last bits of shopping (yes, the 'last pre-Japan trip into Leeds' I talked about in my other blog post turned out not to be the last one).  Well done if you managed to get to the end of this, incidentally, I know it's a long one!

James

外国人ゲストハウス

In anticipation of me moving to the Big Rose 21 Foreigner Guesthouse (ビッグローズ二十一外国人ゲストハウス) I'm doing this quick blog post.  I'm going to make a video when I first get to my accommodation (or maybe once I've settled in a little bit), so I thought that before I do that you should all see the video that I saw when choosing Big Rose 21.  Incidentally I chose it because Miles, a University of Leeds Japanese student who went to ICU, whose EXTREMELY helpful and absolutely fantastic blog you can read here, stayed in a different guesthouse in the same area, run by the same company, and recommended it to me.

So here's the video; I know it looks a bit crazy with all their murals, but it should be good!

 

Separate to all this, today I bid a final farewell to Aiysha, one of my best friends from school.  She came over to Otley for a couple of hours and we went to the pub with Ayu and had a lovely chat and a sad good bye.  She's certainly one of the people I'll miss the most when I'm in Japan!  Slightly comforting is that fact that she's studying at Imperial College London, which is where Ayu will be going in October (well done to her by the way!), so we'll have that as an additional connection.

My preparation for Japan is going very quickly now, I'm studying Japanese every morning in preparation for my placement test at ICU, before seeing Ayu for the rest of the day, during which time I do all my preparation, packing, and all that (and play a little of Pokémon).

Tomorrow I'm going to say a last good bye to my grandparents near York.  As they don't have a computer, I'm going to print off all of my blog posts so far and give them to them, and then my parents are going to print any posts that I do in Japan, and then send them to my grandparents in the post so that they can keep up with my life in 日本!  After I get back from seeing my grandparents I'm going over to pick up my yen from Leeds/Bradford Airport.  I was originally due to go pick them up today, but I received a phone call from Travelex last night saying that they didn't have enough in stock, so I should pick them up tomorrow afternoon instead.

So much to do, so little time!

James

Oo, and incidentally, I read yesterday that The Libertines are getting back together for some more gigs!  They are going to play next summer (or this summer, depending on the article!)  in Europe and the UK, so I'll definitely be getting a ticket to that!  It would be amazing if they came to Japan whilst I'm there, like they did a few years ago.

Vacuum-Packing Socks & Ordering Yen

I vacuum-packed some socks today.  Well at least it counts as packing!!

That's almost all I've done, however.  You can see on that photo that I've also stuck some underpants in my suitcase, and started to fold other things up on the floor.  Instead of gradually filling my bag up as I go along, I'm going to sort everything out on the floor first, then put it all together like a jigsaw puzzle to fit in when I'm happy!

And yes, I really did vacuum-pack my socks into a Sainsbury's freezer bag.  You can't really see it from the picture, but it's really tightly packed, like when you buy some liver or fish from the supermarket in one of those heat-sealed vacuum packs,  the ones that always make it look like it's just a fillet of mackerel on a sheet of gold paper.  It's really flat, and now takes up a lot less space in my suitcase than if I'd just bunged all of my socks in.  I didn't use any fancy methods though, I just put the socks in a bag and then almost sealed it, just leaving a tiny gap, before kneeling on it to push all of the air out and then quickly sealing it tight!  It's tempting to do that for more items of clothing, but I fear that's a little too Alan Partridge.

In other news, I ordered some Japanese Yen today!  The exchange rate is currently ¥126 to the Pound, but that figure is fluctuating all the time.  It's depressing to think that two and a bit years ago, you could get literally twice as much for your money; the exchange rate was around ¥250 to the Pound.  I found the best rate was through Travelex; I got it at ¥121 to the Pound, much better than the ¥115 or ¥116 I've heard that other people have been getting through the likes of the Post Office recently.  So everyone reading this blog from Leeds Uni who haven't yet got their Yen yet, get it through Travelex!  You'd have thought they'd give me ¥122 after that endorsement, but it wasn't to be! 

So I ordered ¥121,000 (well done to anyone clever enough to realise that's £1000's worth) to take with me to last the first few expensive days in Japan.  I'll have to pay ¥77,700 when I check into my accommodation (first month's rent, first month's utilities, bedding rental and deposit), as well as the deposit and initial credit on my Suica Card (Tokyo's equivalent of the London Oyster Card), some books for the university, and a bicycle.  Yes I know it's a bit hopeful to want to get all those things with that amount of money, but we'll see!  I'm going to the Travelex counter at Leeds/Bradford Airport on Tuesday to pick the money up.

Once I'm in Japan I'm going to open a bank account, and then transfer the current balance from my British HSBC account, as well as my savings.  I just upgraded my HSBC account to a student account (a year late, I know), so now I can take advantage of my overdraft!  Although I'm really going to try not to go into it, hence why I didn't upgrade during the first year of university.  I might have to though, if I don't get the Takase scholarship.  Oh, and by the way, I've now discovered that we will find out who has been awarded the scholarship at the end of August.  There is a lot of the competition for the 20 people who are awarded it each year, as I mentioned in a previous post, so hopefully my entry essay was good enough!  I suppose I'll find out in a week or so...

There are now just over 5 days left until I set off for Japan!  Still so much to do!

James

One Week to Go & Japan Leaving Party

It's taken an age (but yet no time at all, if that makes sense) to get here, but there is now just one week left until I go to Japan for the year!

I'm still pretty unprepared; the amount of packing I've done so far extends to merely buying a suitcase, which is now sitting at the end of my bed, eagerly waiting for me to pack it, having gained a healthy layer of dust in the meantime.

My excuse for not having packed yet is that my bag will contain primarily clothes, all of which I'm likely to wear next week.  This excuse obviously has to run out some time, so I'll have to spend the last day or two before I travel wearing some very old, unstylish clothes which I won't be taking to Japan, or just be naked.  I'll probably do the former, to be honest.  Not that any of the clothes I'm taking to Japan are particularly stylish anyway, if we're frank.

At least all of my really important stuff is sorted, like my visa.  That said, I do still need to get my insurance for the year.  Leeds University offers pretty comprehensive travel insurance for just £50, so I'll most likely get that; it's what most year abroaders seem to do, anyway.

Last night I had my Japan leaving party, where I invited some friends and family over for food, drinks, and just a general goodbye!  As far as I know(!), everyone enjoyed themselves, and I did too!  It was sad thinking that I wouldn't be seeing most of them for a year, and saying goodbye to everyone really did make the year abroad feel a lot closer.  The only people still to say goodbye to are my grandparents, whom I should be seeing next week.  

So last night's party started off with some food courtesy of Mum; chili con carne, chicken bits, different salads etc, and then brownies that Ayu made, with some strawberries and whipped cream for pudding.  Mmmm.  After that we went out for a few drinks at Rocca, Otley's finest (and only) bar.  No, Rose & Crown, you'll never be a bar, no matter how many bad lighting rigs you get.

It was a lovely night, all in all!  I'm really going to miss everyone over the next year, but I'm glad that my last night with them was so enjoyable.

Below are a few pictures from the evening.  The top one was a tribute to Miss Natasha Clancey, who couldn't be bothered to be there.  She also has a very mockable photo pose, hence the setup of the photo.

I'll blog in a few days, after I've packed a bit!  Getting close now!

James