First Day in Japan

The night I arrived, I went to the local circle K convenience store and got some beer (good bear, around $2.50 for a 500ml can) and 2 mysterious onigiri - I still have no clue what was inside (I guess I could check the kanji but it's a painful process).  I hear that I should get one of those translators where I can draw the kanji (or an iPhone :P).

Nevertheless, they were tasty - I ate one that evening and another one the next morning.  For those of you that don't know, onigiri is a rice ball with some stuffing and covered with nori (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onigiri).  The packaging was pretty interesting since the nori is separated from the rice by plastic and you pull it in the right way to remove it so that it wraps the rice (that way the nori doesn't get soggy from the rice).

The first full day in Japan was a bit tough.  Before going, I realized what I'm getting myself into but it just doesn't fully hit until you experience it first hand.  Being in a place where you can't read anything, you don't understand the language, and really don't know anybody is a bit sad.  Plus my day was pretty much messed up with the sleeping cycle and time difference of 13hrs. 

My apartment is in this building (pics of inside coming soon):

Here is a pic of the nursing/health sciences campus I live in:

This day was also my first trip to the nearby mall - which is quite large and has a huge supermarket store JUSCO.   I walked all around the mall.  Apart from the standard clothing type stores, there were a few interesting stores and tons of restaurants and a huge food court.  I visited the HMV and checked out the Japanese music selection :).

I was hungry and it was around lunch time so I went to this conveyer belt sushi place in that mall.  The sushi was pretty good - very fishy!  I ate 5 plates of sushi and paid around $14.  The prices on little signs before each plate type on the belt were in kanji characters so it was fun reading them :).

The yellow plate with the sign on the left foreground says 230yen:

In front of the ramen shop was a hilarious display of lifelike ramen noodles being liften up and down from a bowl with huge chopsticks:

Mall entrance (on the 3rd level) to the JUSCO supermarket:

The Romantic Street store is a huge arcade kinda place with tons of machines where you put money in and try to fish out various kinds of things:

One of the first things I bought at the supermarket was some fruit.  A package of 4 bananas (quite tasty ones) was around $3.50 and a package of 2 large peaches was around $5.50 - a bit expensive but very delicious.  The fruit selection was not too great at that store.

Towards the evening, I went to visit the main campus of the university (a few subway stops away).  Here is a view from inside the train.  The lighted display is very useful showing you where the next stop is.  It is also quite clearly announced in Japanese and in English.  Pretty much all the station signs have English or Romaji names of the stations so it's not easy to get lost.  Coming from the airport, I got a transit card (from a very complicated machine in the wall!) for around $55 worth of transit money.  I already used up around $20 with the long airport trip and a few days of taking the train.  Trains are a bit expensive (cheapest is around $2.50 and price increases based on distance or use of different lines).  So I should get a bicycle to get to campus - much cheaper and pretty much everybody is doing that.  At the university I met about 5 people in our lab (some concluded that they should be studying English - which I surprisingly understood in Japanese, but I definitely need to learn Japanese!).

And that concluded that first day.