Happy [food] post!

Yattaa! After studying so hard for two weeks I managed to complete my test with a great grade and so I can stay in B class like I wanted to. I'm so happy for that, since during these two weeks I've also made friends from my class, they are such a lively bunch! And teachers are all very nice. We don't have only one teacher, but four of them. Three of them teaches one day in a week and our "classroom teacher" teaches us two times in a week. It is actually kinda nice to have so much change, but I just don't get it how they can keep on track with all our hand-in homeworks and what the other teachers have told us before.

But in this post I thought I could be really mean and post you food. I unfortunately have forgotten to picture most of things we have eaten, but here is some nice ones. For sweet section there is ice cream heaven Baskin Robbins which I absolutely love. In Finland we don't have Baskin Robbins, but Ben&Jerry's are kinda same when it comes to ice cream flavours, but they don't set ice cream out same flashy way. More from sweet section there is Crêpes. I absolutely love crêpes in here, but you have to know the best places to go in order to have a nice crispy crêpe. Otherwice you might end up with a too soft one, those kinda tends to collapse if the support (paper cone) is taken a away. And then there is some Japanese delicates, like that fishy thing. The inside was some kind of creme and outside was crunchy and very sugarish. Oishii!

The salty side I can offer you very much less pictures. We tend to cook a lot at home, salomon rice and beef rice are the most common home made foods. My absolutely favorite outside home is Yakitori and Takoyaki, but also ramen is very nice, though in some places it is very much greasy. Many foods have a lots of salt and after a while I had to go to a Turkeys restaurant to get something else than sweet japanese foods. Sushi we have also of course tried out, but I have to admit it (Don't eat me!) I'm not a big fan.

Other things I've been doing here includes one classical concert by Tokyos philharmonic orchestra in Bunkamura concert hall, strolling in Nakano Broadway (visited Mandarake manga store and finally found some of the Sword Art Online manga I've been looking for) with one of our classmates and challenged each other in Game Archades drumming game. We added an extra bite to the drumming competiton, the loser pays Baskin Robbins! I can't wait to weather to get better so that we can spend even more time strolling around the city (now it has been raining many days...)!

Mata ne!

Koenji

Nakano

Bank and phone chaos

Finally it's Saturday! This week has been so busy with school that I barely have had time to do anything else. Monday was off from school becouse of the coming-the-age day. All Japanese who turn 20 this year dressed up in kimonos and strolled around the city. For me it was mostly studying day but at the evening we went out with new school mates to eat some sushi.

This week I was finally able to get down the problems with getting a phone number and opening a pank account! Once my wice friend said that there is only two things upset him in Japan: phone companies and banks. He indeed was right about that. We went to three different phone contract offerers to search out our possibilities. The answer was pretty clear, there wasn't any. In Japan it common to have 2 year contract, 1 year contracts exist but those are usually way much more expencive and those are damn rare. Here exist kind of a prepaid cards as well from small companies but you are going to get your self devastated trying to figure out what has what you need.

Let's focus on the bank for a moment. I was recommended Shinsei bank and I really recommend it for everyone else as well. Shinsei is maybe the only bank in Japan which seems to be from a new era, things with it was extreamly easy and at least Shinjuku and Ikebukuro branches they had English speaking staff as well. The whole procces is very simple. You need to have (1) a recidence card granted for you at least for one year, (2) Japanese phone number which is hosted under your own name, friends, school's or foreign number is not accepted and (3) you need to have your passport with you. Some resources are saying that you need to have an inkan (hanko), a japanese stamp with your name in it, in order to get an account from Shinsei, but that info is actually invalid. You can sign papers with your signature or with inkan.

So in order to get a bank account which it self is easy you have to get a phone number. So we were already devastated with the whole thing. I already said that screw this I'll just keep my money in my finnish account, but Mikko insisted to try one more time. So we returned one more time to a really small company's desk in BIC Camera in Shinjuku. It was called "BIC SIM" (they have also English speaking staff). We had been there one more time earlier with our friend who speaks fluent Japanese, but that time the sim card didn't work in my phone. This is another common problem with the phones that are brought from overseas. But this time we tried it with Mikkos phone (we have same model) and surprise, surprise! It worked! So we tried again with mine as well and... didn't work. There was a moment of ackwardness before the company worker mummled something, and after a moment returned with another SIM card. He told us that the card he tried in our phones was "internet-only", now he would try "internet and calling" sim card. And oddly that worked. They couldn't explain that, but we were just happy!

BIC SIMs deal is pretty sweet if you are not planning to stay in Japan more than a one year. The deal is for one year, but it is not that expencive to cancel it than it is in companies like Docomo and SoftBank. You get your own phone number, can receive calls and call with it. You pay for each call 20yen/30seconds, but the deal includes 4GB internet. That set costs you 2 300 yen in a month. The payment is made through a credit card, so you need a credit card under your name in order to make the deal. You also have to be 20 years old and have a recidence card with you. It takes about an hour to sign the contract and receive the SIM card. So I really recommend trying this out!

It was such a relief to get this whole thing done with bank and phone company. We got our money out from euro accounts (which was super good since euro's value is sinking fast) to our Japanese accounts during this week. Now only paper thingy there is left is the working permit. Usually you would have got that done very easily by leaving the workind permit papers in airport, but in all the husttle we didn't know where to leave them. So now we're dealing with it in the country, but that is mostly out from our hands since the school is mostly doing it for us.

I promise next post is more about fun!

Here is a mixture of pictures about Takadanobaba, Shibuya and Koenji :3 

Mata ne!

Welcome to School!

For all of you thinking to apply to a language school in Japan, I warmly recommend reading this no matter where you are coming from. For everyone else, sorry, this is probably very boring post. ^^

My school started Monday 5th of January 10am. We were handed a personal information form to fill in with a number in a corner. I was number 6. a Teacher guided us to a classroom where we were able to sit wherever we pleased. After a moment the teachers started calling out numbers starting from one taking two people at the time. Most of the students hadn't even arrived yet. I was called out pretty soon and it happened to be the interview test part. Of course I knew the interview would be held in some point, but it really came surprisingly fast. I went completely locked and when the interviewer spoke only japanese I jammed completely. My name? What was it again...? It went badly, but I wasn't luckily the only one.

The seriously surprising part were the classes. This is the part I want really to all of you applying to study to take a good look at, because this is where I was most surprised. I originally made my plans in order to apply to intermediate class in Yoshida Institute. In class levels that would have been the class D (starting class is A). So when we originally had checked the levels and books, we should have been able to go to D class. Maybe with few kanji less than them, but otherwice. Now to the truth. It doesn't go like that. The courses are much harder than what it seems in the paper.

We made an entrance test after the teachers had explained the rules of the school. Teachers had decided a test for you by the interview and what you had told them (how many kanji, how many years, how many books...). I was able to do the B-C test. Aaand it happened to be pretty tough one. We had one hour time and the test was 6 A3 pages long, I barely made it till the end. So be very realistic when setting your goals and understand that the language schools here gets after a some point very surprisingly hard (Basically in the swich between beginner and intermediate, intermediate students are already super talented). After the first shock I'm verry happy with my class.

My result was in between so I was able to decide if I wanted to go to A or to B class. I decided to pick out the B, but there is a condition to success well in the first grammary test held approximately 2 weeks after study begins. If you don't they will move you to A class no matter what. The school also has an ability to deport you from the country if they feel that you are not suitable to study Japanese. Of course that is a supreme matter and that would mean that if you cannot learn even hiragana and katakana in certain time (it was a quite long time tough, months or so), that would happen. (The school also tells that they will call to our parents if our attendance rate is falling, which is quite hilarious from a Scandinavian point of view.)

Also the Go!Go!Nihon doesn't really take any part for the course picking. The school didn't really relay on any information we had last year given to Go!Go!Nihon and it didn't affect on our entrance exams in any way. So I could have been telling to Go!Go!Nihon that I'm advanced leveller and it wouldn't really had made any difference. So don't take any pressure about the level you pick for them.

We started from the Minna no Nihongo book 1, chapter 20 in the B class. The speed is really nice, I really like the teachers. They only speak Japanese in the lessons and we have at least half of the 3 hours we sit in class speaking with each other and for the whole class. We study only 4 kanji in a day (with kanji I'm very much ahead, but it's nice to review these). Our class is pretty big compared to others, we have 22 students. About 1/5 is swedish, 3/5 from another Asian countries 1/5 is other European or USA/Canadian. I really like our class, people are really nice there! And so many languages are spoken there aside Japanese.

Oh and rules are pretty strict in here. Two times 15 minutes late is same as not showing up at all once. And for every time you're not showing up, you loose 3% (or more possibly if it happens all the time, I'm not really sure about this) from your finale course score. The score is build up from attendance, tests in a mid-way and home work = 300 points. And with the final exam total 300 points. So the complete total is 600 points. You have to score over 60% to be able to make it to next level. And if you wish to continue your visa (in order to continu studying here), your attendance rate has to be over 80% (so if it lows 3% everytime you're gone, count from that). And if you wish to continue to a "real" higher educational school, the attendance rate has to be over 90%. However, if you have influenza and paper from a doctor for it, it doesn't affect your attendance rate.

Our school is really lively and it is really easy to chat with other students from other classes too. I have already made friends with some people. Classes from A to C all study from 13:20 to 16:40 so it's pretty easy to meet people from levels close to yours. (D to advanced are studying at morning from 8am)

Here is some pictures from the park close to our school
and from Takadanobaba, where our school is.

Mata ne~