Our second weekend trip in Japan: Kawagoe

This is our second weekend trip and we saw an ad on facebook about the Festival in Kawagoe so we thought, why not? Lets go! And the best thing is that Kawagoe was not that far away from the north of Tokyo where we lived.

Kawagoe is a small city in Saitama. It is a town of history from Edo time so right when you get to Kawagoe center, you can feel the traditional atmosphere in the air by the look of the old wooden houses, the smell of street food, the sound of people walking gently on the street, the water that is crystal clear flowing in the drain. It can be said that visiting Kawagoe means you get the ticket to the history train. The name of the town itself means "the city that looks like Edo". The architecture structure of houses here is also unique, the wall is made of sand and rock with special beton to stick the rock together. With this unique structure, it could survive a big fire in the Meiji time. This is how the center of the city (Kurazukuri) looks like...

There is one special clock in Kurazukuri that is the symbol of the city. It was built more than 400 years ago by Sakai Tadakatsu - one famous architect of Japan. The clock has diligently rung the same sound everyday, 4 times per day throughout 400 years at 6 am, 12 pm, 3am and 6pm and that makes the city even more unique.  

However, we went to Kawagoe not just because of Kurazukuri, there was a big festival in the 3rd weekend of October in Kawagoe that attracts millions of people. This festival, or course, have been there since the Edo time about 350 years ago. In this festival, different big "houses" create float that are decorated very spectacular. These float carrying crafted dolls and people playing instruments along the Kurazukuri area and whenever they meet each other along the way, they will perform hayashi performance with flutes, drums and dancing. It was like singing battle. 

The preparation of the float

The street was starting to be crowded

My shark buddy is watching the preparation of the float

Me and Teemu in front of the old clock

It was full moon and the performance was about to start

Teemu was enjoying the traditional sake in the matsuri cup and he apparently did not enjoy me taking his photo :D  

That was an awesome experience. Stay tuned!

Transportation in Tokyo for students (and normal people too)

There are many transportation companies in Tokyo that it might be a mess sometimes. However, you can be a pro after 1 month living here.

There are basically 3 big companies:
1. Tokyo Metro (metro, only inside tokyo)
2. Toei Line (I dont use it much because it does not cover cool places in tokyo)
3. JR (train , crowded train :D and it goes to outside tokyo too)
4. Other minor companies like Skytree line, Tobu line, Keisei, Tsukuba express,...

If you are student in University in Tokyo, you can use the unlimited rides discount on the line between your house to school which is about 30 to 400 euros per month  :D depends on how far your house is. You can calculate the monthly fee on www.navitime.co.jp/ by putting the metro station of your house and your school to the depart and destination, then search!
and then scroll down to see this in the search result

This means that for university students, 6 months from Nishi arai station to yotsuya station is 38140 yen per month. It is twice as expensive if you are not a student :(.

This can be cool if you live somewhere that the metro line from your house to the school can go through cool places like Ueno, Tsukiji, Ginza, Ikebukuro, Asakusa etc,. then you can enjoy "free" or "unlimited" rides to go to these cool place after school or anytime you want. This fact could be considered when you try to find houses.

The monthly ticket price for students also depends on how many companies included in the line. For example if you live in Ikebukuro and your school is in Yotsuya, there are 3 options

1. JR Yamanote + JR Chuo (transit in Shinjuku)
2. JR Yamonote + Marunouchi line (transit Shinjuku)
3. Only Marunouchi line

Based on Navitime, option 1 is the cheapest and then option 3 is the 2nd cheapest and please do not choose option 2, the combination of different companies brings the most expensive option, it is more expensive to choose your monthly ticket going through JR and Marunouchi line than only Marunouchi line even though only Marunouchi line is longer.

So really, choose wisely the line that you are going to travel. If you like to explore things a lot and do not mind wake up a bit earlier to go to school because the line is longer :D  do not hesitate to pay a little bit more to go on the longer line ;). In the ticket office, they will let you choose what you want and pay accordingly.

In my case, I live in Nishi arai and study in Yotsuya. There are 3 options for me

1. Tobu line - Hibiya line - Marunouchi line
2. Tobu line - Chiyoda line - Marunouchi line
3. Tobu line - Hibiya line - JR Chuo line

We chose option 1 because it can go to Ueno, Akihabara, Tsukiji, Ginya and Kokkai gijidomae so whenever we go to these places, we do not have to think for the fee and that is awesome.

If you have any question, I can answer :)

Stay tuned!

Flight and House!!!!

After dealing with different papers in your home country, you will need to start to fight in another battle called "Finding cheap place to stay and cheap flight to go" ;)

I. Finding flight

I believe you are already a super traveler and familiar with your different website to find cheap flight like
https://www.skyscanner.net/
https://www.ebookers.com/
http://www.edreams.com/
and
http://www.momondo.com/
already.

Flight to Tokyo from Helsinki is about 500-700 euros. To me, the most comfortable flight should be no more than 2 transits and last about 10-14 hours. More than 2 transits and long distance light will make us super tired especially moving around a new place with big luggage.

In addition, it is better to fly to Haneda than Narita airport because the public transport from Haneda takes only less than 30 mins to Tokyo center with only 600 yen max while it might take more than 1000 yen from Narita and the travel time will be 1200 yen to 2700 yen :D

Our flight was by SAS and transited in Copenhagen with the price of about 670 euros yo Narita as the cheapest option because we booked it quite close to the departure time so I think when you receive your CoE already, it is good time to book your ticket. No need to wait until you have your visa because the CoE is quite sure that you can go already :).


II. Finding houses

There are some rules you should follow and it is pretty much the same rules as finding flight ;) so you need to be sure where is your university and which metro line goes through your university's station and then follow the line and find house based on that. The price, comfortability and the distance will be trade-off meaning that you can only pick two out of three criteria ;). In our case, we picked price and comfortability (I will tell you later).

Your university will provide you dorm but your dorm might be more expensive than market houses and also the transportation might be tricky (even though it is the school's dorm). So you should really do some research before hand.

There are some online place where you can find a place:

https://tokyosharehouse.com/eng/
http://www.sakura-house.com/en
https://www.facebook.com/RealEstateJapan/?fref=ts
https://www.kabocha-b.jp/en/001/
http://www.chintai.net/ (this place required you some skills in Japanese but the price is very cheap here)
and of course the most awesome place that we all know
airbnb.com

Some of the above page has the money currency as yen and they usually use the word "man" or something like this  "4.2万円" which means 42000 yen. The kanji 万 means ten thousand and of course 円 is how you write yen in kanji.

HOW MUCH IS REASONABLE?

I would say it depends on your budget. You should benchmark with the price of the house plus the transportation to the price of the dorm that your school provides and you can see. Some of my friends are happy with their houses in Yotsuya (near Sophia University) and in Shinjuku and they are ready to pay 500 - 800 euros for that because it is near the school and near the coolest place in Tokyo so it is easy to parties :D. And then there is me, who lives 50 mins away from school by train and metro but only pay less than 180 euros so it is really your choice. Like I said, you just need to trade off among MONEY, DISTANCE and COMFORT.

ADDITIONAL MONEY

There are plenty of additional money besides the rent so please be aware of this or else you will be surprised :D:

• Deposit (one month’s rent) 
• Key money (one month’s rent) 
• Agency fee (up to one and a half months rent) 
• First month’s rent = 80,000
• Property insurance = 15,000
• Maintenance fee = 10,000
• Key exchange fee = 12,000

However, you can avoid these ridiculous money by choosing the agency or site wisely, i.e. there is no such additional fee in airbnb or in tokyo sharehouse.

HOW DID WE FIND OUR PLACE?

We set the minimum price that we are willing to pay (e.g. 350 euros) which is later on become the filter on the searching sites. We used mainly tokyo sharehouse and airbnb since there seems to be no additional fee. After almost 2 months looking around and contacted many houses, we finally found a newly built sharehouse from GG house management on airbnb. Here is there official website

http://gghouse.co.jp/en/

They have many houses available in the north of Tokyo and the service and the price is very reasonable. There is no ridiculous additional money and they have English speakers to assist you.
There will be a post about my experience with GG house later :D.

Stay tuned!

Procedure before the trip

Hello there!

Today I will write about all paper work you need to prepare before getting on board :). This is one of the most tiresome part but when you have prepared everything smoothly, things will be paid off.

I. AFTER BEING NOMINATED BY THE COORDINATOR.
You need to still apply to the partner university with all of the forms and requirements are sent through the coordinator. For Sophia University, you need to submit:
- Application form
This paper required you to fill in your basic information and the proposed courses you will take in the university (which you can change later). You need to have 4,5 x 4,5 passport photo (which is not the size in Finland) so you just need to tell studio taking the photo a bit further so later on you can cut the edge yourself :D. I took the passport photo in verkkokauppa which costed only 1 Euro for 6 pictures.

- 2 recommendation letter from professors
You need to ask your 2 different teachers to write you some words. If you plan to have some good impression for your scholarship then this is one of the most important paper, otherwise, just some words from your professors.

- Certificate of health
This one is required for the Certificate of Eligibility (one kind of paper as an approval for you to make visa). The paper will ask you to have lungs Xray and other basics stuff. What you have to do is to book time in YTHS (Finnish National Healthcare) to have the doctor filled and signed in the paper proving that you are totally fine :D. It was quite tricky for us to have the Xray because in Finland, when you do not have any health problem, Xray is allowed to use (radioactive FYI) but the Japanese side really ask for that so you need to really persuade the Finnish healthcare to do that for you or you have to go to private one (costs more than 70euros) to have to paper filled in. To have this paper done, I had to go to see doctor 3 times: to fill basic information, to do Xray, and to receive Xray result.

- Housing application
I am pretty sure every schools have their dorm ready for exchange student so if you want to skip the tiring finding housing part, then fill in this paper. Also another plus side of dorm is that you will live with other students and enjoy exchange life with clubs and organizations in the dorm.

However, before deciding to stay in dorm or not to stay, we have done some research and found out that Sophia dorm (soshigaya) is the cheapest one (about 400 euros per month not including electricity and water) among all of the options but in order to go to school, we have to travel in 1 hour and 20 minutes walk in the busiest line of Tokyo and other dorm prices are very high so we decided not to take this option, we did not fill in the housing application.

- Fill in COE form
Like what I mentioned. COE form is very important for your visa so the more careful we put in the information, the faster it will be issued. IF there is any problem with the information, the university will notify you to check and correct it, which will take more time for it to be issued. I have filled my dad's income in VND instead of Yen so the school had me correct it :D

After filling in all of the information, you will bring the documents to our coordinator to have it sent. Do it before the deadline or your package will be rejected XD!


II. LEARNING AGREEMENT

Then you need to take a look at the courses available in the university again (For sophia University, it is available in syllabus inquiry) and fill in proposed learning agreement to submit and approved by Aalto University.

Universities in Japan have different credits system compared to European one. So 1 credit in Japan equals to 2 ECTS in Europe.

In Sophia University, you are required to have 12 Japanese credits (=24 ECTS per semester), and you are not allowed to take other language courses than Japanese.

III. ARRIVAL PACKAGE

After your CoE is approve, the Japanese university will send you some sort of package that includes of information for the orientation, acceptance letter the visa instruction and your CoE as well as a paper for the working permit.

If you are planning to work in Japan, you need to fill out the working permit and submit it in the airport.

IV. VISA APPLICATION

Then you need to prepare to submit your application to the Japanese Embassy located in Unioninkatu, Helsinki. The application includes of

1. Passport
2. Certificate of Eligibility (COE)
3. Acceptance Letter from University
4. 2 photos (45mm x 45 mm)

The visa is issued to you within 1 week with the price of 22 euros (cash). When you receive your visa attached to the passport. You are pretty much ready to go!!!!

Hello there! My first blog starting my lifetime trip is here

Hello

This is my first post in this blog. As you can read from my description, I am a student of Aalto University School of Business. I am writing this in Tieto :D while I should prepare for my final thesis presentation coming up next Thursday *Panic* and I also should clean my flat also to terminate it :S *Panic 2* and I should pack my luggage to fly next 2 weeks *Panic 3*

However, I am still here writing this first post because why not :D and as a girl who lives very emotionally, when I catch the emotion and flow, it is the best to show it out right away or I will forget it.

The emotion here is the excitement of starting a lifetime trip. As a master student finalizing the stressful thesis, a trip to Japan is like a gap year holiday, preparing before jumping into nest 40 years working non-stop. Also, my job seeking journey so far has been horrible terrible, which is mostly because I am bashful and not confident enough during interviews, even though academically, I am sure I am not that bad :D. So an exchange time like this, I believe, can help me enhance my confidence and communication.

My thesis is written for an organization in Finland. I started writing in June and finished it last week. Two months of concentration has passed quite smoothly, although I was distracted by Pokemon Go and some Korean TV shows XD. Next week, I will present the thesis and hopefully, the supervisor will not find any terrible mistakes in my thesis! After that, it is time to go! Yeahh

I applied to Sophia University in Spring 2016 and got the acceptance from the coordinator in January. Before applying, I did not research much about the university as I was planning to somewhere else. As the matter of fact, Sophia was not my choice. The reason why I could not get to where I wanted was because I did not apply it early in my first year in Aalto, hence, the index in the second year is really not my side. Let's take an example.
 I have GPA = 4,7 (that is the truth :) I am nerdy) but I have studied only 36 ECTS when I applied in the 3rd semester. As the result, my index was only 4,7 *36/3 =  56,4
Assume that A is in his first semester here with GPA only 3,5, studied 24 ECTS,  his index is going to be 3,5*24/1 = 84 taddaa he ranks much higher than me even though her study is not as good, so he can get to the exchange place where she wants and I will go to less desired place. The competition is tough for second year student or students who studied slowly for GPA (like me) so please take a closer analysis and apply for exchange study early in the first year!

However, although I was disappointed because I cannot get to where I want, Tokyo is still very good, cannot complain. Thanks a lot to the coordinator, Minna, who tried to fit everybody to their desired places. 

I did not want Tokyo that much in my first preferences because everybody knows that it is expensive, the most expensive city in the world. I really hesitated, my to-go or not-to-go decision drove me crazy for sometimes. Whenever I checked the housing price in Japan, I dont want to go. The cheapest house the university offers is around 40 000 yen (excluding utility and all kind of irrational cost like key cost :o and cleaning cost :o and greeting cost :ooo)  which is around 400 euros per month. Even more outrageous than that, some of the dorms cost around 900 -1000 euros per month  if we choose the option to eat inside the dorm for dinner and breakfast. 1000 euros is enough for me to live 2 months in Finland like a rich person seriously. At the same time, the number of paper I need to submit for the CoE procedure is very overloaded. I needed to submit a health cerificate with lungs X-ray (it is obligatory for everybody!), 3 paper forms, 2 recommendation letters and housing applications. These are even less than Keio University where you have to submit your bank statement and your parents income proof :D and THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING *Panic*


To gain the motivation to go to Japan, I went online and search google with keywords 


"Sushi"

 "Okinawa"

"Wagashi"

 and "Sakura", these pictures in the Google search made me feel that Japan is the heaven on earth, especially, regarding cuisine haha XD. Sugoi de su ne ! (awesome, right?). So when you are tired of procedure to go to Japan and afraid of expense in Japan, you can do the same, lets see how it help you. 

Bonus
 here is the reasons to live in Tokyo: 
https://tokyocheapo.com/lifestyle/top-reasons-to-live-in-tokyo/
http://travel.cnn.com/tokyo/visit/best-japan/worlds-greatest-city-50-reasons-why-tokyo-no-1-903662/ 
So do not hesitate when you have the opportunity to go to exchange, especially to Japan. I think that the expense is going to be more than you expect but the life time experience is going to worth it.

Goodluck! ^^