Posts
When we first arrived in Tokyo we were greeted by several students from Waseda University, all of whom were very friendly and excited to see us. As it turns out, our group of 30-some-odd students has 4 student volunteers from Waseda who are basically there to help us to get oriented, and they are awesome. Natsumi, Maru, Koutarou and Shiori have spent an incredible amount of time making preparations for excursions, negotiating cell phone plans, and helping us enjoy our introduction to Tokyo. We've been staying the Toyoko Inn in Ikebukuro (池袋) , one of the many neighborhoods within the city. It's a popular area, with many restaurants, karaoke places and shops lining the streets, making it a lot of fun to explore when we are done for the day.
We spent our first few days at Waseda's campus, having meetings and slowly but surely exploring the campus and surrounding area. It's enormous compared to K, with about 8,000 undergraduate students at the University. After the first few days of fairly regular orientation-y activity, we took an hour train out of Tokyo one morning to climb Mount Takao (高尾山). While our entire route was on a nicely defined trail, it was quite the hike and when we all reached the top after 2-3 hours of hiking everyone was appropriately exhausted, but the soba at the top of the mountain was worth it (not to mention the view (which I don't have a picture of (sorry about that one))).
While climbing Mount Takao was easily our biggest excursion as a group, we've seen an incredible amount of different sights by simply walking through different areas of Tokyo. Throughout the tightly packed roads of the metropolis one can occasionally find a traditional Shinto temple or shrine. As far as I can tell, these parks and shrines are the only two places where you can see a tree in Tokyo. Regardless, I like that even in the modern city there are still definite signs of traditional Japanese cultural.
On top of all of this exploration, we have actually been preparing for the academic side of being a Waseda student as well. Yesterday, I finished my first round of class registration. Waseda works on a lottery system, so there are no guarantees, but assuming that I get the classes I signed up for this will be the first time in 15 years of education that I won't be taking a math or science class. What I will (hopefully) be taking is Japanese, History, Architecture, Business and Sociology. All topics that I find interesting and most of which I've never had the chance to really try out. Needless to say I'm excited for the upcoming semester =)
So that's all for now. I apologize for the sporadic nature of this post, but later posts will include more details as orientation draws to a close and I should theoretically be more capable of maintaining the blog on frequent basis. Just to hold you over though, here are a couple pictures of the group. Enjoy!
