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.

Throwback Thursday: Tokyo apartment

I promised photos of my room in Tokyo for comparison to the one in Hitachi. Here they are!

The room looks pretty ok in the photos, but guess how much stuff I hid behind the bed. :P Not really much space to do anything, especially to cook anything. The table also wasn't big enough for my study style (I need space to spread my books and notes!), but luckily there are plenty of cafes in Tokyo where I could go for studying.

But the location was perfect! If you don't remember, I lived in Takadanobaba and had only two stations to Shinjuku and five stations to Shibuya with Yamanote Line, which is the busiest line in Tokyo. I certainly don't miss the morning rush hour in it.

Greatest things in my room were the TV (great Japanese listening practice, current room doesn't have one...) and the light switch on the wall next to the bed. 

Yes, I kept my rice cooker on the floor because there was no space.

Doorway with genkan. The closets are only for hanging stuff, so not that useful and I ended up keeping half of my clothes in the suitcase.

If you're still wondering why I'm so happy with the Hitachi kitchen...

Bathroom is a bathroom. It's the same size in Hitachi as well. Note: Japanese people love baths, thus a bathtub and not just a shower. Though I have to admit that taking a hot bath after a long day feels reaaally nice.

My great balcony.

The view. Actually pretty nice if comparing that the people living one floor lower would probably stare at the wall.

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! :)).

お久しぶり！

Long time no see! Pitkästä aikaa!

I've been lazy with this blog (again!), so there hasn't been any updates for a long time. I have also taken a lot of photos with my phone, but I can't to transfer them to my computer at the moment. I'm going to update things while in Finland. At least something. :)

Anyway, I'm doing fine, here's some updates:

- This is the last week of school, with only final presentation left on Thursday. On Friday we'll have a Christmas Party and tomorrow is reserved for final presentation practice.
- I'll go back home for Christmas, meaning I now have less than a week in Tokyo left. Where has the time gone again?
- I took the Japanese language proficiency exam (JLPT) level N3 on 6th of December, it went ok, I think I should pass.
- I had a great time with my host family during the visit in October and I've met them also a couple of times after that. :)
- Visited Lake Kawaguchi during a holiday and visited also amusent park FujiQ Highland, which has some world record rollercoasters. Saw Mt. Fuji!
- The internship starts in the beginning of January, but we already had a 2 hour introductory visit to our work place (which is all the way in Hitachi-shi).
- No snow in Tokyo (as expected), but it actually feels like autumn: There are still warm days, I'm using my lightest jacket and some trees still have almost all their leaves. In Japan the indoors are cold during winter though so there have been plenty of times I've used my wool sweaters.

Also, if there's someone reading this blog who is considering for applying for Vulcanus program for the next year. Just do it. :) Thus far the language course has been demanding, but at the same time fun and rewarding (I really can't believe how much I've improved even though it feels like I'm slower learner than my classmates). I can't comment about the internship yet, but I'm looking forward to experiencing life at the countryside (well at least it's countryside compared to Tokyo).

For questions about the application, you can check out the Vulcanus forum which Jose is keeping up. I'm also registered there and can answer via there or here on comments if you have some questions, though the application process is pretty straightforward in the end. :)

Asakusa [Sat 12th Sept]

Some pictures from my trip to Asakusa with some fellow Vulcanusians in September. Asakusa is a district in Tokyo and it's famous for the Kaminari Gate and the Sensoji Temple.

The famous Kaminarimon

Asakusa sunset

Some Asakusa restaurants

Dinner at okonomiyaki (etc.) restaurant where you sit on the floor.

Sensoji looks better in the dark.

Odaiba and Oktoberfest [9th Oct]

Last Friday we headed for Odaiba in Tokyo for Miraikan Museum and Odaiba Oktoberfest. Miraikan had a special Pokemon exhibition some people wanted to see, but the weather was really nice so I wanted to stay outside. I might go back there some day to see ASIMO, a humanoid robot, which can walk, run, climb stairs, kick a ball etc. while standing on two feet. I think that's really impressing even though I don't know much about robotics. Here's one video about ASIMO.

Oktoberfest was not quite as lively as the real Oktoberfest in Munich and a bit expensive as well as they had German beers, so some of us opted for buying beers from the shopping mall and drinking them outside the Oktoberfest area. So I actually walked and hanged out more outside the area than inside. 

We left the Oktoberfest when it ended at 10 pm and took the Yurikamome monorail to Shimbashi station. What is so special about that monorail? It doesn't have a driver. See here for a video (not taken by me): daytime , night. These videos take the train to different directions so don't mind that.

Arrived to the Tokyo Teleport Station (by train...)

Ferris wheel of Odaiba

Some "futuristic" architecture

Oktoberfest at 4pm. People hadn't gotten here from work or school yet.

Huge Gundam mecha (=giant robot controlled by human inside). And no, I don't honestly know anything about the Gundam series.

Our drinks and sweets outside the area. The three similar ones are "autumn special beers".

Inside the tent.

Come on, it's not Christmas yet!

Looking more bad-ass during the night.

Odaiba seafront view at night