Moving to Hitachi-shi

Hey, my name is Kata and I suck when it comes to writing a blog. It's been three months since the last update, but for my defence I have to say that I didn't have internet in my new room (only on my phone) until the last days of Jan.

I spent my Christmas holiday in Finland, met friends and family, ate ryebread, cheese and salad, did a shopping as I needed to get things for to survive the next 8 months, ate ryebread, ate ryebread etc... Did I tell you that I ate ryebread? Best thing ever when toasted and eaten with butter, tomato, cheese and cucumber. Yum!

I came back to Japan on Jan 4th and moved to Hitachi-shi on the 7th, so I had 2 full days to clean up my room, do moving-out-registration at Shinjuku city office, meet some friends at izakaya, deliver Finnish souveniers to my host family and pack up all my stuff and send some of then to my new dorm ahead of me. I used Yamato Transport's Kuroneko TA-Q-BIN service which was both efficient and reasonable priced. They picked up my luggage by 6pm on Wed and on the next day it arrived to my new dorm during the time slot I had specified.

The luggage I sent to Hitachi. They are the same size. I also carried a full backpack and a sportsbag with me. Wondering how I'm getting everything back to Finland...

All six of us moving to Hitachi-shi or Hitachinaka-shi from Takadanobaba (Baba for short) went together. Alan (UK) is living in Hitachi as well, but his internship started before ours so he already left earlier. From the Team Baba, Thomas is moving to Kudamatsu (far away to the southern tip of the Japan's main island Honshu) and Francesco (IT) to Tsuchiura (halfway between Hitachi and Tokyo).

Ed and Anthony are living at the same dorm as I am, while Mathilde, Aidan and Giovanni are living near Katsuta station about 20min by train from our nearest station, Hitachi-Taga. We got picked-up by our supervisors at the station and they took us to our new dorm to do the registration and get the keys, showed us the bus stop we'll have to use to get to work and finally took us to the city office to do the registration.

I never posted any photos or told anything about my room in Baba, but I have the photos and I'll promise you I'll post them here at some point. Anyway, my new room is waaaaay bigger and I have a kitchen as well as my own laundry machine and dryer! I also have a huge amount of closet space, the thing my previous room didn't have. Couldn't be happier with this new room. :) This dorm also has common rooms on each of the four floors, another thing we didn't have in Baba.

What is this amount of space!? (It's normal in Finland, but not in Tokyo)

I finally have something that can be called as a kitchen!

Those closets can easily fit people inside, they are huge!

The view from my window.

View to the city from the corridor.

Inner yard. You might be able to see our pets (yellow rubber ducks) in the fountain if you look really closely ;)

I'm going to write more about my Hitachi life later, just wanted to do a quick update after a long silence (yes, I'm still alive here! :)).