Hanami in Hitachi

After the hanami weekend in Tokyo, it was time for hanami in Hitachi on Sat April 9th as the season here is usually a bit later than in Tokyo. This year though the sakuras all over Japan were apparently ahead of the average year schedule. There are several cherry blossom forecasts (桜予想) to follow, but these forecasts usually appear quite late for tourists to have any gain of it for their trip planning. I think best guess would be being in Japan during the first days of April and actually staying a bit longer in one place to assure you are there during the full bloom. I was lucky enough to spend one month in Kyoto two years ago in April thanks to our school for reorganizing the period system and leaving me without courses during the new 5th period.

On the 9th there was a Spring festival at our work place in Hitachi. Me, Anthony, Ed, Aidan, Alan and Mathilde decided to go and see it. Also generally no photos are allowed on the company area, but today was an exception. Though I actually think the prohibition applies only to the work related stuff so I've taken photos of the trees also before when they were in the early blooming stage. This post will again contain a lot of photos so I'm only posting full bloom ones.

The day was the first really warm one in Hitachi this spring and while we were walking from the train station to the company, many of us hoped we would not chosen jeans to wear in the morning. I even got a slight sunburn...

The road to the company which the bus takes everyday.

The festival.

Entertainment for kids. That guy was the most stereotypical anime bad guy I've seen in a while, but that itself made it fun to watch haha.

Trying out the festival sake ("nihonshu" in Japanese as "sake" means alcoholic drinks in general).

Mathilde and Ed represented Europe in the "loud-voice-competition" (which also had kids as participants). Ed won and got 10,000 yen (~80 euros) worth of gift cards for shops. You were supposed to shout some phrase: Ed shouted a basketball cheer in Lithuanian and there was a guy who was leading for a while with はらへったー！ meaning "I'm hungry!". :D

After the company festival, we headed for lunch near the station and then to Hitachi-shi for some more sakura. I could only make a short stop there as I had to go for a drinking party with my yosakoi teammates in Mito. No photos from there unfortunately, but I just love how my teammates (all Japanese) love my English pronunciation haha. "Say this, say this." "Waaa, so cool!" :D

Hitachi Civic Center

Hitachi Heiwa Doori

Bonus story about sakura: Japanese people also seem to love special/limited edition stuffs, so during the sakura season you'll see season special sakura flavour drinks or some green tea bottles and beer cans getting a seasonal cover with flowers.

Cherry blossom latte

Daily life in Hitachi and general updates

How are you doing?

A small update of what has been going on lately and how's the daily life here as the blog posts appear months later than the actual thing happened.

- I'm generally doing fine (yay).
- Living in Hitachi is good. More about it below (trying to keep the list clean).
- Got addicted to a melonpan they sell here every Wednesday, it's too good! This one actually has melon in it and they bake the melonpan in the van so when you get it's fresh and fluffy. Yummy!

I got melonpan with Jess every week and I'm now trying to send her the weekly melonpan photos. :)

- Got new friends from Malaysia (Jess and Adrian) who were also doing an internship in Hitachi and living at the same dorm. Their internship was also an 8-month one, but it ended in April and they've already gone home by now. :(
- Got some new friends from the new employees. Though they are all foreigners haha.
- Spent a wonderful Golden Week holiday in Kyoto while meeting friends.
- Joined a yosakoi team at the end of January and keeping up quite well. Got an expensive costume (around 35,000 yen ~280 euros), but I love it. Had my stage debut a month ago and the first yosakoi matsuri/festival/competition is coming this weekend. In June I'll also participate the Yosakoi Soran Festival in Sapporo, which is the biggest yosakoi festival in Japan. Last year there were 270 teams, 27,000 participants and around 2 million visitors. Woopwoop!
- Starting playing taiko didn't turn out well as I went to a basketball practice in Jan and got a ball to my finger... The finger was not broken (did x-ray), but it's certainly not ok. It took almost three months to heal to partly ok. Even now, after four months, it hurts occasionally, but it's getting better. I could start taiko now, but yosakoi takes so much of my free time. The practice and performances also collide with the practice of one local taiko team whom I spoke with, so I guess I can't do it after all. :'( Have to play a lot of Taiko no Tatsujin instead!

General opinion about living in Hitachi

After the initial shock of "there's nothing here!" I came to realize I have all the most important things here: a supermarket and a 100-yen-shop next door, a couple of konbinis, a huge pharmacy store and a 24-hour book store on a way to the bus stop, an electric-appliance store half-way to the station and a train station relatively close. The train station could be closer, but it's still within a doable distance. And btw there used to be a station right next to our dorm, but they closed it ten years ago... That's why now our dorm seems to be in the middle of nowhere. There's also a really nice bath (onsen) only 2 km away from the dorm which even has a sea view. :) Here we also have both sea and mountains near and I really mean they are near. Though not as near as the mountains and river in Hitachi-daigo. We also have some restaurants, 100 yen per plate sushis and other ones as well as a Starbucks (here?!). The restaurants and Starbucks are not right next to our place, but within a doable distance with a bike.

From the bus stop.

Anyway, at first I was thought I would get bored here and was thinking what am I going to do with all the free time I have. But my schedule was quickly filled and I don't have problems with free time anymore, haha. Also once I got used to living here I realized how this is a lot like Finland. There's nothing much where I live in Finland even though I live relatively near the Helsinki (the capital) city center. From here, Mito, the prefecture capital, is quite close as well (30 mins by train), though it could be a bit more lively there's nothing much there either. For a short stay like mine, this place is a really nice one to see a different side of Japan. Not sure if I would like to stay here permanently, even though I love my yosakoi team and the melonpans and I'll be sad when I have to leave.

Daily life

My normal weekdays go like this:

* 6:30 - wake up
* 6:50 - get out of the bed after a couple of alarms and cursing why I have to get up (I'm not a morning person)
* 7:30 - leave the dorm and bike to the bus stop or half the way
(if it's a day for yosakoi practice, I'll leave a bit earlier, bike to the nearest station, leave my bike there so that you'll get home faster in the evening and walk to another bus stop)
* 7:50 - get on a bus (there's only one to go with in the morning)
* 8:20-8:30 - arrive to work
* 8:50 - start working
* 12:00 - a 45 min lunch break
* 15:00 - coffee break
* 17:20 - day ends, going home
* 17:40 - take the bus home
* past 18 - arrive home, get groceries on the way, do laundry, iron shirts, clean up, cook, try to update blog, study Japanese, read books, watch series (currently I don't have any), practice yosakoi choreography from videos or accidentally get lost in the internet and find out it's already 22:00. I need a lot of sleep (like 8-9 hours every night), so I'm trying to go bed early. It rarely happens.

Or if I'm going to a yosakoi practice on Tuesdays and Thursdays

 *17:20  -  walk to the station
*18:00 - take a train to Mito
*18:30 - arrive to Mito, get dinner, play Taiko no Tatsujin
*19:40 - practice starts
*21:30 - practice ends
*22:04 - take a train back (this one or the one before if the practice ends a bit early)
*22:45 - arrive home, take a shower and go to sleep

Or I might have a Japanese class on Tue from 19:00 to 21:00. As the yosakoi and the Japanese class collide, I'm trying to do them every other week.

Weekends

I don't even remember when was the last day I took easy at home. Generally since mid-April I've been busy and will be until mid-June mostly because of yosakoi and my fiancé visiting. In yosakoi we have an all-day practice (10:00-17:00) almost every Sun in a place that takes my 2 hours to go to. If I have free Saturdays (no practice or festival or holiday), but I usually spend them either by going somewhere with friends or writing the monthly reports for Vulcanus.

Mito ume(shu)matsuri

I know April is the season for sakura (cherry blossoms), but before talking about them, I would like to focus on other beauties named ume (plum blossoms). (Btw. matsuri means festival.)

On Saturday 5th of March, 6/7 of Vulcanus Hitachi(naka) crew set off to make a trip to Mito, the capital of Ibaraki prefecture, and it's famous Kairakuen garden. The garden/park is famous for it's plum blossoms and being one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan. On Saturday there was also a umeshu (plum wine) festival going on and there you could taste various umeshu from all over Japan for 30 minutes. Sweeeeeet! Also literally. :D

Mito is only around half an hour by train from Hitachi-Taga, but for lucky Aidan and Mathilde it's the next stop from their station.

This is a (flower) photo heavy post. You've been warned. ;)

The prettiest photo first so it will appear as the preview photo when I post it to Facebook. :P

But wait! That looks like a cherry blossom! Yep, it does, but it's a plum blossom. Probably the easiest way to tell these two flowers apart is that cherry blossom petals have split at the end of each petal while plum blossoms are round. More ways to tell the flowers/trees apart can be found for example here and here. (There are also peach blossoms which look almost the same as plums, but apparently those petals end in sharp point.)

Half of the beauty of the plum trees comes from the trunk. A random tree on my way to a bus stop.

Seeing part of Kairaku-en already!

Typical festival booths.

Tokiwa shrine with people queuing for praying.

Umeshu matsuri ticket.

These are all plums from the Kairaku-en garden, just different varieties.

Some of the trees had only began to bloom.

Night illumination at Kōdōkan.

Night illumination at Kōdōkan.

Lake Senba. For some reason this reminds me of Espoo in Finland...

And as the last one, some flower I in front my yosakoi practice hall.

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! :)).