First days in Tokyo

First week is behind and it's been a busy one.

Tokyo is... hot and humid. Though not as hot as it could have been (for example only +26'C at the most during the day predicted by the forecast for the first day). And yesterday is was raining cats and dogs (="satoi kuin saavista kaatamalla" in Finnish) and more rain is predicted for this week especially for tomorrow and Wednesday. Yay....

I left for Japan on Mon 31st from Helsinki with a straight Finnair flight and arrived Tokyo Tue 1st Sep around 9am. I can never really sleep on the plain so I practiced the Japanese way of sleeping in the train on the way to our hotel. I didn't fall asleep, but the Japanese seem to do so almost instantly. (For those who don't know, Japanese people might have really long commuting to their work or school and thus they tend to sleep on the trains.) We took the cheapest train from Narita Airport to Ikebukuro, so it took us almost 2 hours to reach the hotel.

The view from the hotel room in Ikebukuro.

All of us (all 45 people) spend the first night at the same hotel and on the next day we had orientation at Omotesando. After a super brief orientation we waited for our company representatives who took us to our dorms which for us is located at Takadanobaba. Our place is so really nice: we had everything needed ready for us and the place is relatively close to the school as well as Shinjuku. Shinjuku is one of the busiest areas in Tokyo with the busiest train station in world. Wikipedia tells that "The station was used by an average of 3.64 million people per day in 2007".

Not-so-busy Shinjuku in the early afternoon.

Besides the orientationDuring the first days we had to do registration to the city hall which is in Shinjuku, get National Health Insurance required for people staying for more than 6 months, open a bank account and get a sim card for phone. All of these went pretty smoothly. There's another post coming up soon with more detailed information about all of these (aimed for the next Vulcanus students).

Some photos of one evening in Shinjuku:

A smaller street in Shinjuku.

The Godzilla is always watching you...

On Thursday we had more orientation and in the evening the official reception of the Vulcanus programme at the Sheraton Miyako Hotel. The dress code was business as there were people from embassies and the companies present. There was no-one from the Finnish embassy, but I met a person who is going to work in the same team as me in Hitachi. My feet hurt so much as we had to stand for the whole reception and I wore heels 12 hours during that day.

The venue

Loppukevennys:

A shop named Kiitos with a Swedish flag even though Kiitos means "thank you" in Finnish...