One of the biggest transitions for me to life in Japan was the fact that there were actual seasons throughout the year. As I have lived in San Diego for nearly all of my life, I was used to not really experiencing any change in weather throughout the year. Sometimes it would get a little hot, sometimes it would get a little cold, but there would really never be any drastic difference in climate throughout the year. Given my lifestyle in San Diego, I never needed any special clothes for the changing seasons or anything like that, so I knew had to prepare in advance for my year in Japan. Be sure to pack accordingly to the typical weather of wherever you would travel abroad to. Packing aside, I was really grateful that I was able to fully experience each season in Japan and through visiting gardens and participating in seasonal events, I was able to enjoy the seasons as much as I could.
One of the main travel ventures I had in Japan was a three day trip Osaka and Kyoto. Originally, me and my partner, Charlene, had planned to travel here with our friend Alicia who was able to visit us during our break before the spring semester. On the morning of getting to our bus that departed at 9:30 a.m., we were already running a little late and made it to the subway at around 8 a.m. thinking we still had plenty of time to catch our bus. However, the subway had been stopped due to some kind of issue on the tracks. This was very uncommon and I only experienced this twice over my entire year in Japan. We ended up losing thirty minutes of time and arrived at our destination with around fifteen minutes to spare and all we had to do was find our bus stop.
We ended up not finding our bus in time. If you haven’t seen my post on travel tips, please check it out as a good amount of those tips were learned the hard way, such as this example. Charlene and I were lucky enough to reschedule our trip, but Alicia would have have already headed back to America by then. To make up for this, we bought some kind of charm in Kyoto and symbolized it as her and took pictures of it during our travels to make up for the failure on our part (mainly me) and sent them to her as a gift. Get LostIn this post, I will talk about my experiences on dealing with lost and found in Japan. First off, although it is kind of embarrassing, I will admit that I got lost on my first day to YNU’s campus.
Public transportation in Japan was one of the most influential factors over my year abroad in Japan. Japan has the most convenient public transportation system that I have seen anywhere. In metropolitan and urban areas, there was always a train station and/or bus nearby that could potentially connect to any destination within the area. They are also very consistent and on time, unlike most systems in San Diego. Although this was intimidating and complex at first, I soon became comfortable using public transportation anywhere, such as from Yokohama to Tokyo, or from Kyoto to Osaka.
I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Guam with my partner, Charlene, over the the break, in between semesters. I had been talking about visiting Guam over the past few years to my father, and me studying abroad in Japan was the push that we both needed to make it become a reality for us. This trip was really special for me as it is where my father is from and where he currently lives.
Kamakura and Enoshima are both very close to Yokohama. I consider myself lucky that both were so close and filled with many beautiful locations and historic sites such as shrines and temples that could be easily explored during multiple day trips. Because it was so close, it was easy to hop on a 30 minute train ride to explore a historic city that many others in Japan would have to travel hours to get to.
In this post I will mainly talk about some travel tips that I have learned along the way from mainly my experience with it in Japan. I go into more detail about my travel ventures in other posts, so if you’re interested, feel free check them out.
To preface this post, most of my budgeting was done with my partner Charlene. We split most of the appliances and chipped in equally for other items as well and this was our experience budgeting in Japan. Also, we were poor here in the states, so being poor in Japan was only a slight adjustment.
Cooking in the dorms was definitely a fun and worthwhile experience for me. Since our dorm rooms had a small kitchen area but no means of cooking, one of the first appliances I bought was an induction heater. Although the kitchen work space was very limited, I adapted to be able to work comfortably within it and eventually became used to the layout of the kitchen. It was fun cooking in Japan because I would start to learn which shops to go to, how to look for deals, and expand my options by learning to cook new things.
One key thing I noticed about Japan was the variety of foods, not only within Japanese cuisine, but it also had a lot of variety based on the region or depending on what season it was. Just as quickly as the seasons would change, so would the food options. In this section I will discuss the special foods that appeared during festivals (matsuris), the foods that are special to certain regions of the country and the foods that come and go with the seasons.
AvailabilityIn this post, I’ll go into a little bit of detail about convenience stores (conbini), American fast food, and Japanese fast food in Japan, which was a decent portion of my diet in Japan. The main reasons for why I ate this kind of food was due to the cheap prices and the fact that they are literally everywhere, especially conbinis. For instance, next to our dorm in Gumyouji, there were about four conbinis within a five minute walking distance, with one of them being right next to the dorm. Not only this, but also in the Gumyouji area, there was also about a half dozen Japanese fast food establishments as well.
ScheduleWhen the second semester had begun, there was still an orientation (returning students only had to attend to part of it), where we learned about the semester's available classes. My choice in Japanese classes was pretty self-explanatory as I would naturally take the following level of language classes. Concerning my electives this time around, I decided to take a couple that could count toward my degree at SDSU and help me get closer to graduation, rather than taking classes that would only count toward my total units and nothing else. My schedule for this semester consisted of 15 units and is posted below:
Tuesday: Integrated Japanese, Principles of Economics, Music of Japan and the World Wednesday : Japanese Topic Class, Prospects of Science Thursday: Integrated Japanese, Linguistics 2 Friday: 3rd Year Kanji Orientation and Schedule On the first day of school, an orientation was held to go over what was expected of us as students and what kind of courses were available to us. We then took placement exams so that they could determine what our expected level of Japanese was and what were the appropriate classes to take. I felt that my evaluation was accurate as I had tried to attend a class that was one level higher and could not understand what was going on, so I took the recommended level of Japanese for me. My overall class schedule ended up being 17 units and looked something like this:
Monday: Iaido Tuesday: Intensive Japanese Wednesday: Japanese Culture and Education Thursday: Intensive Japanese, Linguistics 1, Japanese Subcultures, Homelessness Friday: Intensive Japanese Online: Japan in the World I would first like to begin this post by stating that none of this would have been possible without the Gilman Scholarship. Although I still received a few other scholarships, in total they all added up to fraction of the Gilman and I think that in itself shows the significance that this scholarship had on my study abroad experience.
Main BuildingsThe YNU campus was noticeably different from my university’s campus. It had at one time been the location of a golf course and some of that can still be seen today as it featured lush grass and tall, dense trees. Not only did it differentiate in greenery, YNU also had tall buildings that could have as many as eight stories, compared to SDSU where the tallest building only has around five stories. I’m still not sure on the direct size comparison as I mainly stayed in one part of the campus, the International Student Center (ISC). This building was somewhat the base of our program as well as other international programs YNU offered. All of the Japanese language courses were taught there and also several other elective classes that I had taken. The main floor lounge was where I had spent most of time on campus with other fellow exchange students and I had gotten to know a lot of friends in that one area. Other than the first week of attending YNU and the few classes that were in other buildings, I had rarely explored the rest of YNU’s campus, which is something I have slight regrets about not doing.
AmmenitiesMy dorm was a three story building that consisted of three halls, A, B, and C. Most of the students lived in halls B and C, which were separated by male and female. These were single-person rooms that had a bed, desk, wardrobe, balcony, kitchen area with a sink, cabinets, fridge, and bathroom with a bathtub and toilet.
Before I knew it, my summer had already passed by so quickly that I was finishing up my final packing and would soon be departing for Japan. I had checked the weather in Japan on the day I would be arriving and saw that it would be around 70 degrees Fahrenheit, so not too hot or cold, so I just wore a pretty simple outfit with a sweater. I went up to the airport with my partner Charlene, who had also been accepted to the same school as me, so we were both pretty lucky. And from there on, we pretty much explored Japan together. The plane ride was about ten hours and was a direct flight to Narita Airport. I wanted to brush up on my Japanese during this time, but ended up watching random movies for most of the trip. Once we had landed, I had made sure that I had everything that I brought with me or might have stowed away in the small cubbies on most seats. With everything double checked, I was ready for the year to come.
|
AuthorI am Kyle Sablan and I studied abroad at Yokohama National University (YNU) during the 2016-2017 academic year. This blog was created as one of the requirements for receiving the Gilman Scholarship. The purpose of this blog is to share my personal experience with everybody and encourage interest in studying abroad. Archives
April 2018
|