Freezing pipes

Soooo my pipes froze. Luckily my friends in the apartment let me use their showers and such until someone came and unfroze my pipes but unfreezing your pipes is expensive. I was really disappointed seeing as how winter has just started and my pipes have already frozen. To make things worse, only about 6 hours after my pipes were unfrozen, two of them froze again! I was not about to call for them to be unfrozen because I figured it was a waste of money and they were pipes I could live without. As long as my hot water pipe in my shower works I'm good! Luckily a few days later (last night) they unfroze by themselves. Today is pretty warm. Warm to the point where it's raining rather than snowing. It's really odd.

I emailed the advising office to register for my classes next semester but they have yet to get back to me. I'm hoping it's because of the holiday season and that they will get back to me soon after New Years.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from Japan! So last night I walked for about an hour and a half in -11C weather. It's an experience I think you'd all best be without. I have never felt so much pain in my life. Buy gloves everyone! Apparently, Christmas day isn't really much of a big deal here. Everyone is all about Christmas Eve. I have work tonight though so I'm missing a pretty big chunk of the Christmas party sadly, but it's fine cuz I like my job and I'll at least I can make the last bit of the party. I have no real plans other than that. Anyway Merry Christmas everyone!

Winter beak is coming!

Winter break is starting this week already! That means Christmas and New Years is almost here! I'm really excited to have a Japanese Christmas and New Years. Apparently, around this time, the Japanese have 3 different parties. The first one is a Christmas party, the second is a year end party and the last is a New Year party. The end of the year is a fun time in Japan! I can't wait!

Visit to the doctor

Sorry for the late post this week. It turns out that my self diagnosis was correct and I did indeed have Shingles. With that plus the cold and the workload from school I've been bedridden for the past week or so. When I went to the doctor, he gave me A LOT of medicine. I had to take 12 pills a day (4 with every meal) and apply a cream to the Shingles twice a day. I was freaking out because I thought what I had was really bad if I needed that much medicine. However, getting that much medicine is apparently the norm here in Japan. In fact, one of my friends who is studying abroad here from China said that they get even more medicine in China! The most medicine I've ever had to take was probably about 4 a day so you could imagine my surprise when I received all that medicine. And it was expensive! With all the visits and medicine, the fees were over $100 with the insurance! But I'm pretty good now so I guess it was worth it.

Getting sick

Here's a nice fact for you all:

The hospitals in Japan close on the weekends and have relatively short hours on the weekdays (close at 6pm)

I have some sort of weird rash on my head that kind of came out of no where. I did some Googling and self diagnosed myself with Shingles. I've had this rash for about a week now and it's progressivly gotten worse. I decided I should go yesterday, but that's when I found out the hospitals close. Mind you, nearly all the doctors seemingly work in the hospitals, so you go to the hospital here even for just a cold. Odd huh? Anyway the hospitals will be open tomorrow so I'm going to go tomorrow. I'm a little nervous for my hospital experience since I'm sure I won't be able to understand all of the medical terms and such. I'll try my best!

Snowball fights!

This past week has been pretty eventful. It snowed to the point where I could finally have my first snowball fight! I thought my hands would be fine because I was wearing gloves but they got cold from making snowballs much faster than I had expected. I also ended up slipping on black ice a lot, but I didn't fall. However, people have been telling me it's only going to get worse so I ended up spending a lot of money on snow gear. I bought snow boots, some thermal wear and an electric heater and it all cost about $200. Not the kind of money I wanted to be spending on winter stuff, especially since when I go back to Hawaii I will have no use for it. Oh well, it can't really be helped.

Snow!

This morning I woke up to someone ringing my doorbell like the world was going to end. It was much to early for me to be getting out of bed. I almost ignored it and stayed in bed, but the doorbell ringing didn't stop for a good minute, so I ended up having to get up. It was one of my friends waking me up to see snow falling from the sky! It's the first time I'd seen snow fall. It was great! Glad I was woken up to see it!

Hakodate weather

Wow! This weather really isn't the kind of weather I'm used to! The temperature has been hanging around 10 and 0 degrees Celsius lately. That's between 50 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And this isn't even as cold as it's going to get! The wind has been really strong lately too. Last night I decided to go for a walk and when I came back, the wind was blowing so hard on my door that I couldn't open it. I thought I had locked it for a second before I realized that it was just the wind! When I opened my door and went inside, the wind blew so hard that it slammed the door in my face! It's really fun to experience new things, especially like this. Though, I am a little worried for when winter actually comes!

Cold~

It's starting to get really cold here! It still hasn't begun to snow yet. The snow shouldn't be coming for another month or so, but it's already so cold! Me and the guys were out walking one night and we were surprised to see that the temperature on the public thermometer read 1.2 degrees Celsius! It's gotten to the point where I need to use 2 thick blankets to not only sleep, but just to be in my room if I'm not wearing pants and a jacket! This island grown boy wasn't made for the cold. But I'm still excited to see snow!

Eventful weekend

This past weekend was crazy! On Saturday we had a sort of picnic gathering with a bunch of other exchange students from other schools. It was really nice meeting other people who were doing the same thing that I was. We were the only ones from Hawaii, let alone the US. All the other exchange students were from China or Korea or even the Middle East. And they were all really good at Japanese AND English. It was very motivational to see other people who had become so proficient in languages that were not their mother tongues. We made a lot of friends there! After that we went to a bar and stayed out the whole night. I don't like alcohol so I didn't drink anything. I just talked to people and made even more friends. There was this one lady who got so drunk she was throwing chairs around the bar. Perfect example of why alcohol can be bad! On Sunday we went to a Halloween party with one of the teachers here and though the crowd was generally an older one, it was still a lot of fun! We made lots of friends there too. We made lots of plans with our new friends so we're going to be very busy from here on out!

University Festival

Today was the university festival. It was really fun! There was a lot of food you could buy, but the good stuff sold out really quickly and we ended up not being able to try all the food that we wanted. There were a lot of booths and galleries and stuff but I spent most of the time in the music club room. They had various bands from the music club performing on stage and a lot of them were REALLY good! This school has some very talented musicians. I'm hoping I can learn to play something as good as all of them by the time I leave here! All in all today was a really fun day.

Lots of friends!

Just a couple of quick tip for any student readers who are planning to study abroad here in the future:

1. NO ENGLISH
Well, not absolutely none. In my opinion you need to speak English sometimes in order to ease your headache from constantly having to think when you talk. HOWEVER, you should really meet up with the other HPU student(s) that are going with you and work out a deal to try your best to only talk to each other in Japanese. In my opinion the other two guys and I have been talking WAY too much English and it's hindering out learning speed.

2. MEET YOUR NEIGHBORS
When you move in try and make it a point to introduce yourself to at least a couple of the people in the dorm. There are only 16 rooms in the dorms so it shouldn't be too hard to meet everyone. The Chinese students (they come here for their junior and senior year) are REALLY good people to make friends with because a lot of the time they know a bit of English and have also been here for over a year and can show you around and introduce you. Also, since they also learned Japanese in a classroom setting, they know how to "lower" their speech to a level that you would be able to understand. That and they cook really good food :)

3. PREPARE FOR CELEBRITY LIFE
Seriously. EVERYONE will stare at you. EVERYONE. Students, pedestrians.... even people in their cars will stare at you as they drive through an intersection. No one is trying to be rude. Everyone is just amazed that there are foreigners out here in the country side. This makes it pretty easy to make friends with people though because everyone wants to talk to you. Random people will actually ask you to take a picture with them. It's already happened to the 3 of us many times. Be prepared for it.

I'm having a lot of fun here and I'm learning a lot. My Japanese is still very weak but I'm much more comfortable in speaking what I can and don't mind making mistakes as much as I did before.

Part Time Job!

Last week me and the two other students who came with me were helped in getting a part time job so we could get a little more income each month. It's a pretty sweet job! It's an English teaching class. You teach English to Japanese people who kind of just want to learn for fun. No Japanese is allowed by you while teaching the class, so I don't have to worry about having poor Japanese skills; I can still do my job! You meet once a week for 1 hour and the pay is 2500 yen per session, so that comes out to about $30ish with the exchange rate. The students are an older crowd; maybe mid 30s and up. They're all really nice people! You're given an easy to follow workbook to use with the class and I haven't had any problems yet. I actually have my next class in a couple of hours so it's time to get to work!

First week of instruction

We just finished our first week of instruction. The classes are entirely in Japanese and no other languages are allowed to be spoken during class. The teachers use elementary vocabulary for the most part, so you should have little trouble with following along with instructions and whatnot. The work load is pretty small, but I was told that it will get pretty intense in the future. We only have class Monday-Thursday so every weekend is a 3 day weekend! I'm going to spend this 3 day weekend at the school studying and stuff to try to expand my vocabulary!

About bills and living space

I'm waiting for my camera charger to come in, so I'll add pictures later when it does.

Room:
-Single apartment. 1 room, 1 full bath
-Furnished (some apartments more so than others depending on what previous students left there)
-Washing machine/dryer hybrid in the room
-5 minute walk from the school

Bills:
-Rent: 12000 yen/month
-Gas: Did some number crunching. We get a flat charge for gas that's just about 2,000 yen. Each m^3 of gas is about 790 yen. A 10 minute shower cost about 160 yen in the sense of gas. Rough estimates but relatively close.
-Water: About 5,000 yen/2 months. You will always pay the same price unless you go over your water budget, which is pretty much impossible.
-Electric: About 1,500 yen/month
-Health insurance 2,000 yen/month. This is an estimate for now as we didn't sign up for it yet.
-Phone bill 1,200 yen/month. This is for the most basic plan. The phone was free.
-Internet : 840 yen/month for the best internet plan we could get.

There is no WIFI at the apartments, so 2 of us decided to get internet and split the bill 420 yen each. The school is signing us up with health insurance. Don says it's easier this way. We believe it's about $20/month but I'll update that for sure later. Electric and gas/water as you probably assumed depends from person to person. The gas company representative told us that in the winter time, students have had bills of about $300/month because they would constantly leave the room heater on. In the end it all depends on how careful you are. Also, BRING LOTS OF MONEY when you come here. It takes a while for the stipend to kick in so you'll be without money for a while. We are unsure of when we will get our first stipend. I brought about $1700 and after 3 days I'm down to about $1500 (I bought pots and pans and groceries and stuff), so I think I'm pretty set. One of the other students on the other hand came with only about $100 and now has no money until who knows when. Also, try and find a way to get in contact with the students who are currently here before you come up. They can tell you what exactly is in the apartment, what they are willing to donate/sell to you and what you may need to bring yourself so you can decide if you wanna bring stuff from home or try and buy it out here.

Also, US plugs will fit in the outlets here if they are 2 prong. 3 prongs wont fit and you will need to buy an adapter. Try to buy an adapter for your 3 prong plugs before you come here as I've found them a bit difficult to find up here.

School in Japan!

Hello readers! I arrived in Hakodate Japan just about 3 days ago. The host school has been extremely helpful so far! Don Millar, the professor in charge of English speaking foreign student was nice enough to meet me at the airport upon my arrival and bring me to my apartment, which was a really big help seeing as I brought over a ton of luggage! Yesterday, Don took us to get our bank accounts set up and to get us Japanese phones so we can get in touch with the school and new friends without paying roaming charges. I have to say, all of this would have been near impossible for me to do, seeing as how I am no where near fluent in Japanese. Don even bought us all (there are 2 other students from HPU here: Ali and Stephen) lunch on two separate occasions! And apparently Don and another teacher took Ali and Stephen to a pretty expensive dinner when they got here. I got here a day after the two of them did so I didn't get to be a part of that. Nonetheless, Don and the rest of the faculty has been a big help! If you're thinking about studying abroad in Hakodate, but are afraid to for whatever reason, do not worry. The staff at this school is really nice, especially Don and you always have them to help you out.