Week 1 in Hakodate

So.... Finally arrived in Hakodate... Got picked up at the airport by Moritani Sensei & Andre. The Airport from the air looked exactly like Mauritius! close to the sea and everything.... except.. you cant swim in this sea.... & also the roads on the way to the airport reminded me of leaving plaissance cauz the buildings and view looked similar. I was enjoying the ride & all the japanese signs. 

So eventually we got to our temporary house... which is the ghost house.. cause apparently, the guy's dorms were full......  not gonna lie, that house creeped us out. its like a temporary house for club activities and stuff i believe.... there were 2 rooms with several bunk beds... & only two of us in the entire house. we got shown our apartments that we could choose from and all.. then went to seven eleven. Got some onigiri and some peach Fanta. Both good. Loved the onigiri. :)

We went back to the house and a truck selling Yakiimo passed by advertising it with its speakers and it sounded a bit like an old lady yelling into the speakers so we were pretty creeped out. needless to say we were uneasy to fall asleep that night. The house was pretty nifty tho.... we had fun with the toilette that sings, warms up and sprays water at your bum. We also had a really hard time figuring out how to throw garbage....... yes you heard right.... it took us like 10 minutes to figure out how to throw a bottle. we had to consult their manual to see if it was burnable.. non burnable.. plastic... etc..
Another thing is we had our three pronged laptop plugs to charge and we went around town looking for an adapter that would allow us to charge them but they couldnt find them anywhere. we were beginning to think we would not be able to charge our laptops......

2nd day we met the other international students. hey were pretty nice and we all went to get our Gaijin cards and other stuff filled out. Also met Kaori, one of the students that recently came back from Australia and she was SUCH a big help. actually everyone here are willing to help you so i really like that. went to get some Taiyaki. got a matcha one :) good stuff. i remember someone saying it to me before.. and it was true. Japan is really clean, you wont find any garbage anywhere easily.... and you wont find a garbage bin either. it was annoying to carry my garbage wrapper around.
then we went to try and get phones.... and every softbanks told us they didnt have prepaid phones so several searches letter we settled for a crappy deal at AU. but meh, it still allows us to communicate to everyone.... and that's via email that is. The guy told us to come pick up our phones the next day.... but me and ramin forgot his name. it was fu..... se? fu..... fu.... something...
so in the end we settled with calling him Fu-Chan. フッちゃぁん～ ... yea we laugh at random things haha.
So we went to a building called テーオー　which had a hyakuen shop and we found a three pronged adapter..... just like that. :/ We went for curry ramen that day. was good :) Kaori said Ajisai wasnt good cauz it was like a chain but hell... still good stuff :p.

We also discussed our apartments that day and we got this tiny apartment that had an extremely high initial cost. we were not really happy about that :S. It's basically us paying ridiculously more than we should have cauz the guy's dorm is dirt cheap in comparison.... but as im typing this, we have already moved in so i guess there is no point in complaining. The apartment is ok, bathroom and kitchen is kinda small... the toilette is interesting.... the watertank also has a sink on top haha.
We met up with the international guys that guy cauz it was one of their birthdays & we went to a tonkatsu place.... and i had curry rice. was ok. After we went to Danny's room, one of the international students who is from Perth, Australia & was here a semester before us. He had Wifi on so i felt like i remet a long lost friend... everyone took our their iphones haha.
The next day, we moved into our new expensive apartment. The one bed has some sort of storage under it.. Ramin and I, are using it like a bunk bed... sort of. I still think it reminds me of harry potter.

So we went out to buy futons... and no mattress... so our backs kinda hurt but i can live with it. still havent gotten the mattresses as we speak. oh and the apartment has a lil camera that allows us to speak to and see anyone who rings our doorbell.

Later that day, Moritani Sensei took us to Hakodate station to drop off Kaori cauz she was going back to sapporo for a lil bit. we got to walk around and i found the price to go to honshu via train. apparently it goes under the sea so that was pretty cool. We also got to see the fish market and the crabs were HUGE. it was awesome :) i was quite happy to have been there. We went to a place called Sukiya that night and found some local students that we met during orientation. Had to press on a button to order bu we didnt know so we were hesitant. In the end i got cheese curry. Really good stuff... but when i ordered... she asked if that was it. and i said yes...... thinking she meant with my order. so she turned around and left....without Ramin ordering anything ^^".

ok so.. next day. We went to look for random stuff.... We walked past Hakodate station and kept on walking. People on bicycles were passing us so we were annoyed and thought that we needed bikes. It's strange that in Japan, if you have a bike you can go pretty much anywhere you want to go. We walked for i think about 3 hours and got too tired.... and the first bike shop we found, we bought our bikes there. Its a pretty cool bike. has a lil light thingiemajig & it's own built-in lock with a key.... oh and a basket. so we rode out of there and got back home in like 15 minutes haha. it is so convenient. For lunch that day, we bought several ingredients to try and make nabe with whatever we had.... We forgot to buy a cutting board so we had to deal with octopus. After several tries.. we decided to throw in the octopus tentacle even tho it was a bad idea... and yes it was. but it was pretty good, except for the fact that we didnt have a table yet to eat on lol.

Before leaving, we heard a loud noise at our door. We thought someone tried to break in.... and we kept hearing it at all the other doors so we thought someone was trying to break into all the apartments.... we were joking about hitting him with our umbrellas & kept checking the camera at our door to see if he was outside cauz we kept hearing noises. Ramin kept expecting a face to show up on the camera, so we called that guy "no face" since we couldnt see a face on the camera.... There is also a corner that leads nowhere in front of that camera so ramin kept thinking maybe he's hiding behind there. Eventually we decided to leave the house to go outside and we saw the mail on our front steps... and yea.. we had the "oh..... the mailman...".... yea..
So we met up with everyone at the dorms to see what they were up to and they said they wanted to go back to where we were to climb mt Hakodate. kinda wished everyone had bikes but we got to ride the tram which was also cool. So we met up with the girls at the foot of the mountain & climbed up. it was really nice. Hiking up a mountain in the forest at night. sounds creepy but i find that sort of stuff fun. there were a lot of crows on one side of the mountain and two guys in the group got tired and took the gondola thingie up the mountain but we joked around the crows going for them as we left them behind haha. Once we got up there it was freezing but the view was literally breath taking. you see the town with the ocean on both side and seeing pictures on a computer doesnt do it justice.

 it was really nice. So being the cheap students we are, we hiked back down the mountain, this time in complete darkness, having the best flashlight in the group.... my iphone. we were talking about horror movies and scary stories... and the whale burger at lucky pierrot. lol. Danny thought he saw someone but it turned out to be the shadow of a tree haha thought that'ld be worth mentioning.
So after we got down the mountain, we were waiting for another student, Ben, we took the bus down cauz he was too tired. so we waited there for about over an hour or so and still no sign of him. he didnt have his phone yet either. The girls went ahead and us guys waited up here for quite a bit only to receive a phone call from him saying he is already at the dorms..... yea... lol

We originally planned to go for shabushabu that night but instead went to a lil restaurant that had cheap drinks and yakiniku that was close to the university. had some umeshu which was only about 300 yen and the meats were like... liver, gizzard, fat.... I liked it hahah tho a tad unusual.

The next day which would be sunday, we went around looking for stuff....it seems thats all we've been doing... trying to buy random stuff for the house.... rode our bikes further down and we managed to find another McDonalds and another Lucky pierrot. This time we decided to go into the Lucky Pierrot and got the chinese chicken burger for like... 298 yen.

We thought itld be small but it was pretty big and really tasty. :). We spent the day at home watching TV and i noticed japanese reenactments are extremely overdramatized and exaggerated. here was a show of some chick that was overweight and they kept showing people laughing at her as if they were all in a cartoon or something..... This reminds me, i forgot when but there was a show about some masseuse massaging a bunch of girl's breasts to make them smaller or bigger during a variety show. it was amusing to see her stick her hand in the girl's swimsuit and everyone was watching... something you would never do on tv in north america hahaha. We finally got internet! yeyey! managed to talk to my mom on skype which made me happy. That night we didnt go to bed until 4 am. Thank god classes were at 1pm the next day....
First day of classes were ok, had an overview of stuff we had to do and im still nervous during introductions/自己紹介. Went to look for some stuff later on. Got on our bikes to look for the DonkeyHote(forgot the proper way to spell it) and found Mos burger along the way but Danny said it wasnt as good as Lucky Pierrot  here. Also found a Kaitenzushi place but Moritani sensei said he'll show us a nice one one day. I asked one guy where Donkeyhote was and he had a smirk on his face for some reason.... He confirmed... "Mega donkey?" and we couldnt stop laughing after we heard that. This branch is the Mega one apparently.

Found a KFC nearby and i want to try it haha. We went into donkeyhote and checked out the basement... LOTS of cheap sushi... storepacked stuff but they were better than Calgary quality. Ramin found his beloved cherry coke and we go a bunch of storebought sushi to go... I also got my lipton milk tea which i really like :p.
I dont recommend putting poorly sealed sushi boxes in your bicycle basket if you encounter a lot of bumps on the way to your house. yea... by the time we got home, my sushi was all mixed haha and some fell out into the plastic bag...... but it was still really good :P haha.

Thats it for week 1.... This blog is extremely annoying to write... maybe ill do it only when funny things come up. anyways... stay tuned!