Hello! 
So I have arrived in Tokyo! I arrived on the 11th, so today is my 4th day here. 




So let's start from the beginning:
I arrived at Narita Airport on the 11th around 16:00 and after about the longest walk ever through the airport to get to customs, I received my brand new, fancy Japan resident card. Then after more walking and collecting my two huge bags, I met up with the agent from the homestay company who would be taking me to my host family's apartment. Unfortunately we were taking the train all the way to the nearest station to my new family's place (Hikarigaoka) and even more unfortunately we had to make 4 transfers. That wouldn't be a big deal to me usually, but because I had four extremely heavy bags, it was hell. But finally, after about 2 hours of trains in the busy Tokyo rush hour, we arrived at Hikarigaoka. My host mother was there to pick me and my plethora of bags and we drove back to my new home. 
One of my biggest worries before meeting my host family was if they were able to speak English or not. My Japanese is pretty good, I can understand about 95% of things I hear, but because I've had close to no experience with speaking the language, I have no confidence in talking to people (and to make matters worse, I am the most shy person there ever was). However, my host family does not speak English, which I actually found I don't mind at all. My spoken Japanese came to me surprisingly well and so far I have been able to communicate at a very basic level with them. 

So in my family there is a mother, a father, two daughters (Mai and Kana), and three cats. When I first arrived they also had another exchange student from Germany who was staying for 2 nights. Amazingly, his major is physics - my host family now has a house full of mathematic exchange students. There are two bedrooms in the apartment, one for me, and one for the other exchange student, while the family sleep in the tatami room on the floor on futons. They all call me "Megu-chan" which makes me feel about 100% cuter than I actually am (wait, 100% of 0 is just 0...)

my bed and desk

the other side of my room (I still have yet to unpack anything because I'm so out of sorts)

My big window (I still can't figure out how to shut the curtains, I have no common sense)

the view outside my window

the tiniest cat I have ever seen (its name is Haruko)

one of their other cats, Yoshio So the next day was the school orientation for all the students in my program. My host father kindly walked with me to the station on his way to work through the labyrinth of streets (just look at a map of Tokyo, the roads are ridiculous), and I made my way to Waseda on 3 different train lines. It's actually quite a pain getting to Waseda from here - the walk to the station is about 20 minutes, then I take the Oedo subway line for another 20 minutes to Nakai station, then I have to leave the station and walk outside for about 2 minutes to a different Nakai station for the Seibu Shinjuku line, take the train to Takadanobaba, then walk over to the subway again and take the Tozai line to Waseda station, and finally walk about 20 minutes to the university. It took me about an hour or so in total to get there, and in the process I managed to get a huge headache from the heat and stress of finding where to go.  So anyway, the orientation was super boring and super pointless since it was just going over the same stuff I had already read online, and in addition to the headache my stomach started to hurt as well and at one point I had to rush off to the bathroom to throw up, but that's enough of that.  I met quite a few people at the orientation actually, the amount of diversity here is amazing. I met people from Israel, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Latvia... there are literally people from all over the world here (but especially Germany, there are tonnes of Germans). Hopefully when classes start I can meet even more people and manage to make some friends (I do not want a repeat of my extremely lonely and depressing first year of university...) The next few days were mainly just rest days - my family took me out to visit Mai and Kana's schools to see what Japanese primary and middle schools are like, and afterwards they took me to a conveyor belt sushi restaurant (sadly this day I did not have my camera on me so I have no photos but for those of you who don't know what a conveyor belt sushi restaurant is, basically various sushi (and other foods) go along on a conveyor belt around the tables and whenever you see something you want you just take it off the conveyor belt. Each plate has a colour which determines how much it is and at the end you total up the number of plates for each colour which gives you the total price).  And yesterday for dinner we all drove out to Yokohama to go to Chinatown and just wandered around and looked in the shops and stuff, then later went to Odaiba to eat more and look in even more shops. Panda manju! I decided to get the strawberry flavoured one Mai and the takoyaki boat takoyaki! (octopus balls, for those of you who don't know) My host father, me, Kana, and Mai on the trick art painting in Odaiba A present from my host parents - chopsticks with my name on it ("Megu") Purikura taken in Chinatown So yeah! That's been my first few days in Tokyo. I'm still settling in, I'm still super stressed out (I've got so much to sort out - cell phone, bank account, legal government moving stuff, course registration, etc etc), and I'm still super awkward (You thought I was shy and awkward in English, well, Japanese Meghan is about 500x more shy and awkward), but I'm hoping once school starts and I get everything sorted out and get into routine I will feel a lot better.  So now I am probably going to head off to bed. Tomorrow I am hoping to get stuff with my bank account and filling out forms taken care of, tick off some of the things on my list of stresses. Good night!