Introduction Week 1

I'm starting to run out of original titels before I've even had my first class...

So, last Sunday, I got invited by one of my Japanese friends (Mari-san) who studied in The Hague last year to join a futsal (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futsal) event. It took me about 30 minutes to get to the right station (payed about 02,70 for that, can you believe that!?). From there I walked with a group of others to a big mall. At first I thought we were just stopping there to get lunch or whatever before we started, buit it turned out that the futsal field was actually on the roof!!! Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures, but this is apparently a monthly thing, so I'll try to take some pictures next time! Anyway, the group consited of a little over 20 people (3 foreigners, me included), so we were divided into 4 teams of 5 or 6 people. then from about 14:30 till 17:30 we played futsal! And in between I was able to talk to a lot of awesome people :D I was completely exhausted afterwards though XD Even got some scratches on my hands and right leg to prove I did my best out there :P

Monday was the first day of introduction. In the mornign we had the computer oriëntation, so we could log in on school computers. Some of us also had to do an interview with a Japanese language teacher, me included. I guess that went fairly well, but I'm not sure. We get to hear what level we are placed on Thursday. While we were waiting, we watched a movie called Toilet. I missed the beginning because of the computer oriëntation (student's were split in 2 groups), but the movie was kind of interesting. An American family looses their parents, so their Japanese granny comes to live with them. It was mostly English spoken with Japanese subtitles, except when granny spoke :P After al interviews were finished, we had a really delicious welcome lunch at Big Mama's! After that we got a tour of the fantastic library. 5 Floors of books, journals, newspapers, magazines, dvd's, cd's you name it. They even have a section for "oversized books" and in the basement you can find "old books"! The last thing on the schedule for Monday was an introduction to the "GS Network", a group of Japanese students who speak English and help out incoming exchange students. Our dorm was assigned to Shun-san, a boy from Thailand (does have Japanese passport though). He also helped us buy our commuterspass so we can freely travel to and from school for the next 3 months.

Today we had a short introduction about course registration, which is also on Thursday. The most important thing today however was that Shun-san took us to the city office of Takarazuka (the name of the town of our residence), in order to get a number of things fixed. We registered our adress where we stay, we signed up for National Japanese Health Insurance, we signed up for the Japanese National Pension, we signed a paper saying we don't want to pay for the Japanese National Pension and we also signed somethign to recieve a "My Number Card". This is the equivalent to the US social security number and the Dutch bsn number. We actually get to keep that last one, in case we ever return! :D After all the paperwork was done, we agreed to meet with Shun-san at Takarazuka station at 18:00 for dinner. We had dinner with 5 of us in totall, we had okonomiyaki! Three different kinds that we shared.

Finally for today I would like to let you know that tomorrow I will become a ninja! Because we are going on a field-trip to Iga Ueno! This used to be a very famous ninja village, and is still home to a beautiful castle and a ninja museum! We are even goign to throw shuriken tomorrow! We do need to get up really early though, because apparently it is quite a drive by bus.

Write to you all again soon!


Laurens