My Yokohama Home

Sorry for the delay in updating! I just had the opportunity to go out to the DENKIYA-SAN (electronic store) and buy a LAN cable to connect to internet.

I arrived at my dorm yesterday after taking a series of buses and a taxi, and I really like the room! (Not to mention the RA that showed me around--Naito-san--was super cute and nice♪) Here are some pictures of my room:

I bought a magazine at the convenience store and it had this poster which I put up to make me happy haha. Nino~

The bathroom is rly small and you have to step up to get to it. Also, the toilet has 2 directions for a little flush or a big flush. This is probably used to save water. I like it how Japan is so green. Not only do they indicate how to save water, but their trash disposal system is really intricately separated into plastic (or pet) bottles, glass, burnable trash and non-burnable trash (I have yet to figure out the difference...), etc. The sink shares a faucet with the bathtub.

At the entrance, you have to take off your shoes. I want to get some nice Japanese slippers for that reason. You put your card key into the little white box at the left of the door when you are inside your room. This turns on the electricity. When the key is not in the box, the electricity doesn't work--another method of conserving energy. 

My desk! And another poster that came in the magazine I bought--Arashi~!

After being shown around my dorm, I unpacked and made my bed, which is a Japanese futon and took me like 25min to figure out how to do D: Then I went downstairs and Naito-san told me where to find the closest convenience store called Daily Yamazaki. There, I bought my dinner:

Green tea and rice balls. I could only finish 2 of them tho...they're surprisingly filling. I had one with "Sea Chicken" filling that tasted like tuna with mayonnaise and one with "Konbu" filling which had a kinda weird taste.

I also bought a salad for later, a 2liter bottle of water, a TV guide magazine (which I bought mostly for the posters, I'm not gonna lie lol), and some black sesame seed senbei (rice crackers).
***
Today, I woke up at 1am and couldn't go back to sleep (stupid jetlag...) so I went for a walk when it got light around 6:45am and explored the town. It's very small and rural around the dorm--lots of convenience stores and little shops and very tiny streets like Europe. There are lots of people walking around in the morning--mostly heading to the train station--so it seems pretty safe, except for dodging cars as you walk on the pretty much non existant sidewalk.
I found 2 banks that will come in handy later and the train station, which was sooo crowded. Since it was really hard to move once I got to a certain place, I just did some people watching as hundreds of people streamed in and out of the station like schools of fish. There are tons of uniformed kids--high school students, middle school students, and elementary school students--as well as lots of office people--guys in their white shirts and black pants and women dressed all fashionable. I tried to figure out how to buy a train ticket, but failed to do so. It's probably pretty easy once I actually know how. Everything was still closed once I had finished, so I just headed back to my dorm, treated my bleeding foot lol, and took a nap. Woke up at 6pm-ish and went to find the denkiya-san and now I am here.
These first few days will be inevitably boring, but I am still loving this Japanese life and being in Japan. Thursday I start orientation!