(sorry i'm actually posting this on oct 28th, but we had problems with our computer charger and not having time to update and things)

the plane ride from stockholm to helsinki (finland's capital) was about 1 hour. from there it was a 9-hour flight to narita airport in japan. the one fellow exchange student from dalarna university (Anna), coming from estonia, was taking the same flight so we met for the first time at the finnish airport.

stockholm airport









my school's called "dalarna university" (meaning, "the university in the dalarna region"). this kind of wooden horse is called a "dalarna horse" and while they're sold throughout sweden, it's a famous thing from dalarna. all exchange students coming from dalarna uni get one of these and have to take photos of/with it during the exchange.




runestone inside stockholm airport. runes are sweden's old alphabet. the actual language hasn't changed so much that you can't puzzle out a simple message from 1,000 years ago.



not being able to eat any of the in-flight food (everything had sugar and wheat in it), i gave my chocolate bar to the japanese person sitting next to me. that person was a masseuss living and working in tokyo! we spoke in japanese for 2 or 3 hours, and she tolerated my bad japanese amazingly well! it was the first time i'd spoken japanese for any real length of time outside of the classroom. 佳菜子 (Kanako), thanks a ton!!


at narita, while walking to get our passports checked and to get our residence permission cards, this guy saw me with my white cane and gave me, Kanako and my wife a ride!! it was the first time someone'd done something like that for me.

after that, while standing in the line for the passport stuff, a staff member called out in english something like "hey, you! you're a person who can only see a little, right?" and my wife and i were led to a separate line where the staff member filled out the paperwork for the residence card (a card saying you're not an illegal alien) instead of me since it was hard for me to see it! this was also the first time that'd happened to me. i had already felt the kindness of japanese people to an overwhelming degree.


from narita we took a train to tokyo.

from some station in tokyo we took the bullet train (shinkansen) to sendai. it was pretty hard to find the ticket booth! if i'd been alone i'd really had to have asked someone. anyway, when i was getting on the bullet train, an older man standing next to me in line just picked up my suitcase without saying anything and put it into the entryway of the train for me!! thanks!!

inside the bullet train, the person sitting next to me was eating a really delicious-looking "train-station lunch" (box of sushi). i really wanted one! from time to time a train staff member would call out "souveniers!" (お土産ですよー！) and come pushing a cart piled high with random stuff i couldn't really see down the aisle. she walked so fast i don't know how anyone could tell what she offered!






my suitcase









sendai train station. 久美子 (Kumiko) from my exchange school (miyagi university of education; MUE; 宮城教育大学) and Qim (an exchange student from högskolan dalarna who arrived the semester before me) came to pick us up. we got in a van and drive to tohoku university's apartments for exchange students (MUE is too small and doesn't have its own, so uses tohoku's). none of us had been able to sleep on the plane so we were already super tired.

we got a bunch of info at the apartment, applied for internet (wired was cheaper than wireless so we chose wired). our apartment is for married couples and is like twice as big as a single person's apartment, it's HUGE!! the kitchen alone is the same size as the entire room we were living in in sweden!

later on there was a bunch of stuff we realized we didn't know. how do you get cold water from the kitchen sink? where do you put the soap in when doing laundry, there's no special compartment? how do you hold the balcony door open? i know this is a fish grill, but how do you actually use it (it says "don't put water in!" and nothing else)?


together with Kumiko, Qim and Anna we went to the small neighbourhood grocery store called 宇在見 (商店), it's around 3 minutes away walking from the apartment. bought natto (fermented soybeans) and grapes. japanese grapes have a REALLY different taste!! and all the fruit was HUGE!

then we took a bus to downtown sendai, and went to the 100-yen shop "Daiso" to buy stuff like frying pans, plates and toilet paper. you get on from the back of the bus and there's a little ticket machine, you take a ticket and it has a number on it. on a screen in the front of the bus it shows the numbers and then the price, so you know how much you have to pay when you get off. the bus has a change machine inside at the front, but you can't overpay (if you DO overpay, the bus driver will either give you all your money back and make you do it again or give you a "you overpaid!" coupon you can use for next time). for me it's literally impossible to read either the stop names or the prices at the front of the bus unless i sit in like the very first seat, so i really had to buy a bus card as soon as possible.



again, we were really tired. in the apartments they use "IH" (Inductive Heating?) stoves, which don't exist in places like sweden and estonia. the stoves heat up the food faster and while using less energy than other stove types, and the stovetop doesn't get hot and CAN'T get hot if there's no pot or pan on the stove, so it's not as dangerous either. the problem is, the pot has to specifically say that it works on IH stoves or it just won't ever heat up. we didn't know this and almost bought the wrong frying pan, but Qim and Kumiko saved us.


for dinner we all went to a restaurant together with some japanese people and students from the school, and a few other exchange students. exchange students sat on one side of the long table, japanese people sat on the other. we were so tired we were all basically falling asleep sitting up, despite that we tried to talk in japanese. my wife and i couldn't eat anything there because even the miso soup had sugar in it.


then we three new exchange students had to make our way home alone from the bus station to our apartment that we'd only been to the first time that very same day!! well, it was fun.

returning to the apartment, once again we were really moved by the esperanto club's Tezuka family and others. the club had loaned us futons, blankets, pillows and so on for the whole exchange year and Tezuka and his wife had come and set up the beds for us in advance! it if had been just us alone, we probably would've been so tired that first night that we wouldn't have even set anything up.



apartment stuff:




the view from the balcony is a middle school!:








the next day i woke up at 5 am, not tired at all! why?!! at 8 we went out for a walk. we found the convenience store chain called "family mart" and a japanese temple. before coming to japan i had tried looking for part-time jobs in sendai online, and one of the ones that made it clear they hire even foreigners who speak almost no japanese at all was family mart.

going into family mart (which is really a SMALL shop!) 4 or 5 staff members called out, not at all all at the same time, "welcome! good morning!" (いらっしゃいませ！おはようございます) which was surprizing. isn't it fine if just ONE staff member says it? don't you guys get tired?!

during the walk, an old man we passed by said "good morning!" with a big smile. oh, i was happy!

japan is really good to people with bad eyesight. compared to sweden, price tags, the total price at the cash register etc are bigger so even i can normally read them here (in sweden that was a huge problem). at many crosswalks, though not in our residential area anyway, it makes bird chirping sounds when it's okay to walk. shop and restaurant names are normally really big on the front of the building, and there's normally pictures of the food so you can get an idea of what they sell (curry, pastries, etc) even when you're a bit far away and can't read the text. but despite all this, the text on tickets (like bus tickets) and in books is small!

no one was giving us any strange looks. they were also speaking nicely to us. every time we went into any store we read the ingredient labels on every single item really carefully to be sure we could eat it, and took a lot of time in the store, but none of the staff members cared one bit and just continued working. at the register, i was really slow to count out my coins and read the price and so on but they didn't care and just helped me out. really nice!! after that i really wasn't scared at all about buying stuff or doing things in shops.

at 13:00 we met with my online friend "Daisuke" who i'd met through esperanto, who just happens to live nearby! he came to our apartment and answered all our questions about how stuff worked, how to eat certain foods or where to buy stuff as best as he could, and we walked to a few stores together. 99% in japanese! though overall it was fine, there were times when i really couldn't make it clear what i wanted to say. i really had the strong feeling that i wanted to get better at japanese. when i said i wanted to learn sendai dialect, daisuke told us about an event in arahama (fairly nearby place that was completely destroyed a few years ago by a tsunami) and we said we'd go together. probably someone would be speaking sendai dialect there since it's the countryside, he said.

i walked daisuke to the apartment building entrance and right after he'd left, the receptionist guy asked in japanese "oh so that's your friend?". "yes! it's my esperanto friend!" i said. "esperanto language? i don't remember any of it these days but i studied it when i was in middle school!" he replied. i was really surprized!! i tried to say "hello!" (saluton!) but he had even forgotten THAT! too bad.

after that my eyes were hurting... i forgot what i did. anyway we took a long walk in the twilight of the evening. walking around fairly randomly we found a pachinko (slot machine) place, though of course we didn't enter — also a 7-11, where we finally found the official garbage and recycle bags you have to use here, Lawson which i still haven't entered so i don't know what it is, the bigger grocery store we'd walked to with Daisuke that same day, North Mountain (Kitayama) train station and cemetary (it's called 霊園 which is short for 幽霊 公園 "ghost park/garden"). on the wall of a gas station we saw "now hiring! even uni students are fine!" (募集中！学生もいい！) , but if exchange students and foreigners are fine or not we didn't know of course.

at one point, waiting at this crosswalk we didn't see the "push to walk!" button (usually there aren't any!). a businessman who was walking fast past us, without saying anything, pushed the button for us, kept speed-walking and had disappeared before we could even say thanks.













we bought some dried bonito (かつお, just some kind of fish japanese people eat a lot), which is dried with the skin, eyeballs and all. you're supposed to eat the whole thing. we looked up online how you eat it and apparently they fry it for about 4 minutes. the result... was just like swedish food. in the store with the fish i said some really weird stuff to daisuke and my wife because i couldn't see that those fish were all dried, sorry guys.

i also ate my first fermented/pickled plum (梅干し). until that point i'd thought everything i'd tried was good, but this tasted extremely weird and i didn't like it at all! (by now, one month later, i've found out i also don't like "egg rolls" in sushi, certain types of fish eggs, sake, japanese beer, japanese kimchi, soy milk, and that i get sick from tofu).

understanding and speaking in japanese actually wasn't at all as difficult as i expected it to be. japanese people are really, really nice even though we speak badly, so it doesn't feel like we're being rushed to speak well (only very few people have ever rushed me). of course there's been lots of times when i didn't really get what they meant or i couldn't really say what i wanted but it actually hasn't been a real problem so far, even going to the doctor it was fine (the doctor just drew pictures and we used the dictionary on our smartphone and researched the same subject in english once we got home and stuff).

the most difficult japanese is the really fast and polite language from train staff, shop staff etc!! other than that, really slow stuff like traditional singing, and then slang!