Current mood:	relieved
Current music:	The vending machine in the lounge is quite noisy...

The hall of residence
Next topic: the hall of residence I'm currently living in.

Well, what can I say about the hall? The good thing is, it's really nice here, the buildings are just a few years old and therefor everything is still quite new and comfortable. We don't have a park or a garden area, but there is a grass and plant border all around, so it's still okay. I... just don't like living somewhere where I don't have a lot of green around me, but probably that's just me being spoiled from being raised in a town where you literaly can't see the forest with all those trees around.
Our apartments are very nice as well, small but (in my humble opinion) comfortable and all. And - believe it - we are fully equipped with such luxury as a washing machine per apartment, as well as a rice cooker, a little oven (which probably doesn't take more than a single toast slice unfortunately)... etc. We have a single room including the bed and the desk, a tiny little kitchen (with a single hot plate, oh woes~!) and a bathroom. And a genkan of course, there is no such thing as a japanese household without such an entry where you leave your shoes (no exceptions, EVER!) and "climb up" the small step into the apartment. And we have a balcony, a bigger one than I expected (like the ones where the aircon takes all the place and you can barely turn around. Well, my room is on the ground floor, there is not much to see except for the building in front of us, but it's very nice anyway, and not just to hang up our laundry.
One more nice thing is that our previous tenant (which are always the exchange students) have left a lot of things behind, so we got a lot of extra-gadgets without having to buy them on our own, like a tv, a hair dryer, a even have an iron while another girl from Swiss has the matching ironing board... Nice.

But. Unfortunately, it seems like last years' previous tenants pushed the friendliness to leave us "useful" things a bit too far, in other words: We also have a lot of rubbish we are now having to dispose of. Thanks a lot, guys. Not!
While I have been quite lucky, I only had a mountain of empty plastic and paper bags as well as old medicine past their expiration date and a lot of little (but annoying) "decoration material" to throw away (and a giant Halloween Special Edition Rilakkuma on my bed, that beast is everywhere!Oo;), plus two vacuum cleaners, one of them broken, the other so full it was a wonder it didn't burst in my face when I tried to use it. My friend next had the first prize when she discovered clothes and underwear in her wardrobe (some of them broken shoes and belts, the underwear plainly vulgar), personal emails and love letters (in japanese?!) and half-full notebooks, not to mention the groceries past their expiration date and a dirty rice cooker and fridge. Not really surprising we're a bit peeved (or my friend's plainly angry) with the girls that have been living here last year. And they even had the chutzpah to leave us a letter in which they kindly advised us to contact them whenever we have a question or need an advise. Yeah, thanks a lot, we appreciate that, but cleaning up properly would still have been better than to tell us that one of the vacuum cleaners is broken. I'm glad to know about it, but now I am the one who has to throw it away!

Well, that's for our rooms. Another very, very annoying side of living in this residence are the rules.
Thou Shall Not Bring Boys Home! - Yeah, thanks, I don't have a boyfriend, but accidentally I do have a brother. And friends who happen to be male. And what if I can find someone who knows how to repair my broken tv and this someone unconveniently happens to not be of female gender?
But even worse:
Thou Shall Not Come Home After 11 P.M.! - And this, Ladies and Gentlemen, plainly sucks! I'm 27 years old, most likely the grandma of the whole campus, even older than several teachers, and I am not free to do whatever I want to do with my evenings, I can't even leave in order to shop in the nearest konbini or vending machines!
Well, at least I heard that we can announce our plans for the evening to the security guy before going away, it seems like this rule is mainly in order to not make the parents of those rich and innocent girls worry, but it still sucks. I'm not sure yet whether we can do that all of the time, but it seemed to me like coming back home after 11 o'clock too frequently would ensue our expulsion from the residence and therefor from the grant and therefor maybe from the university and therefor from Japan (unless we pay the rest of our stay ourselves), but everyone tells different versions of this exceptions, so I'm definitely insecure about this. And I think I understood that we have to announce plans to take a holiday about two weeks in advance - which sucks as well. Anyhow, our presence or absence from the residence is being controlled around the clock by a computer system, we have a card key to open the gates which registers exactly when we enter and leave by the gates, plus the cameras that are hanging everywhere.
On the other hand, I heard only recently that those many cameras are installed for our security instead of supervising our every movements, it seems like there were several stalker scandals in the last few years where some weirdos had a fetish about breaking into specifically girls only residences to steal underwear and the like. Niiiice.

And just for the sake of completeness, it sucks that we don't have wifi in here. My room's in front of the canteen and the lounge that have both internet access, but I can't hack in connect with free internet acess because we only have about seven lame cables with modem access in here.D:

But then again, up to now it wasn't so bad for me, it's completely dark beginning from 6 p.m. here so the evenings start a lot earlier anyway, and for now I didn't really have one occasion where I wanted to stay away until the critical time. Not saying that this will never happen, not at all, but I guess I'm getting used to this. But this sucks hard for my friend who has her long-term boyfriend living in Tôkyô here.
On the other hand, we had a good time amongst us in the residence as well, especially in the first week. I didn't mention yet that we are all in all five exchange students, two from Paris (including me), two from Geneva in Switzerland and one from Benin, all of us speaking French. It seems like we're going to get along very well, or at least we had a great start together, spending our evenings in each other's rooms and all that, sharing our (good working) material (like watching tv in the someone other's room for those who don't have a tv or a broken tv, like me).

Oookay, I wanted to post a few photos as well, but I don't think I have the time for this anymore, there is a small matsuri (matsuri = festivals with or without a shintô (= religious) background. But skip the religious background and come for the food anyway!:D ~♥) in Ikebukuro today and we are meeting in half an hour now... So, next time then?


[Almost Edit of Doom: I have been writing this entry for one and a half hour. One and a half hour! And then, when I wanted to finally post it, I accidentally clicked on some of the nerdy options here and lo, everything was away, replaced by some stupid html line, and the text not in the cache nor everywhere, simply GONE! Fortunately, it was just a minute ago that I opened the preview window, and there it was, in all it's integrity, minus the lj-cut, ready copy'n'pasta!~♥ *cries tears of joy*