About 3 weeks ago now, I met 2 french people going to ICU in my hotel, so I spent the day with one of them, Lou, in Asagaya and then in Shibuya. We went to Shibuya 109 the big clothes shop in the cylinder building in Shibuya. The clothes in there were really nice (some were a bit strange) but I didn't buy anything because I'm trying to save money a little bit at the moment. Later on the 3 of us planned to meet in the lobby of the hotel at 8 so we could go to ICU together, but my phone alarm clock ran out of batteries during the night and I was late :( Anyway, we made with plenty of time but the journey was so difficult. We had all our suitcases again and we had to catch the train, then a bus and walk through campus to our dorms.
Global House
We left our luggage there and then went for foreign registration. When we got to the office at ICU that we had to meet at I saw Rina who did a study abroad in Leeds last year, so that was nice. She showed us to the city office to do foreign registration and to apply for health insurance. This didn't take long, we had to show our passports and hand over a couple of photos, then we were done.
Once back at the dorm I met lots of the people living in Global House. It's a mix of four year regular students and one year exchange students. There's also a mix Japanese, American, and a few other nationalities living here. I live with 3 other people; two are Japanese the other is Chinese but she has lived in America for a long time.
My room (before I'd unpacked properly....)
In the evening we had to go to a dorm meeting with all the other new students from the other dorms. We expected it to just be about the rules but actually we all had to do a short self introduction at the front of the busy lecture room. It took quite a while though because there were so many of us. Since this meeting I've learnt that they seem to like doing self introductions here because we seem to be doing them nearly every day.
We've had lots of little welcome parties with other dorms to get to know people around ICU, where we all eat food and do the awkward self introductions one by one. Then play games that sometimes turn violent (in a good kind of way)
The next few posts won't be in order and will probably just be as i remember them- and then maybe I'll start writing this properly.......
