My dormitory

My dormitory is called the International Student House, of which I'm living in the South Wing on the 3rd floor. In this wing there are about 30 inhabitants, all of them international students except for the 'student assistent' who is a 5th year japanese law student from Waseda. Miss Nakamura takes on the function of both landlady and housekeeper and she's here 6 days a week during the larger part of the day.
With those 30 students (I think there are even more, but I don't remember the exact number) we share 6 showers and one kitchen with 6 cookers, some rice-cookers, toasters and microwaves. I thought this would result in a big chaos and long queus, but until now it hasn't been a problem at all. Nevertheless I think I should adapt a bit and switch to a bit easier and quicker way of cooking than I was used to. But this won't be too difficult since all I can eat here are noodles (in soup or fried) and rice, which are both quite easy to make. I still have to find out how to make it taste really good though. The kitchen is located on the 5th floor (by the way, here, as in America, they call the 'begane grond' or 'rez de chaussee' the first floor and count up from there, so the 2nd floor is actually the '1e verdieping' or '1ère étage'. I will use the Japanese/American system in this blog). On that 5th floor there is also a room where you can eat and another place where you can smoke and watch television. The showers are located on the 1st floor, so my room is conveniently halfway between both. Next to the showers there are washing machines and dryers that you can use for 100 yen (about 80 eurocent).
My room is about 18 square meters, but because it's equipped for two persons, most space is taken by the furniture. Everything is quite basic but sufficient. One nice thing is that I have my own sink and toilet, so that's already quite some luxury for me. For the rest I use one desk for my computer, and the other desk for studying (once I'll get to it). There's a small balcony, but I've only used that to dry my laundry until now - it's too hot to sit in the sun anyway. From the dormitory it's a 10 minute walk to the campus, so that's very convenient. It's somewhere between the metro-stations Waseda and Takadanobaba, from where I can easily get to more central Tokyo. I can even go to Shinjuku by foot in about half an hour. Around the dormitory there are also quite some restaurants, bars and karaoke-places, so it's always a lively city.
Since most people living in this dorm are international students the main language is still English, even though I hear a lot of Mandarin, Kantonese and Korean aswell because the asian mostly get along with people from their own country, and there are quite some asian people. For the rest there are American, French, Spanish, one guy from Uzbekistan, from Israel, Sweden etc. Even though there's just one Japanese guy living here, everyone still adapts to a more Japanese way of living, eating rice in the morning, taking off the shoes at the entrance of the dorm (according to the rules) and greeting each other in Japanese. Some asian people speak better Japanese then English, so with them I do speak Japanese. Mostly it's English though, and sometimes a bit French.
The rules here are quite strickt. We can't invite any visitors, not to stay the night but not even during the day. Only inhabitants are allowed to enter. This is quite a pitty, especially because this means that people travelling to Tokyo (family, exchange students from other cities in Japan) can't stay at my place - I'm sorry guys.
All in all I'm quite happy with this dormitory. Even though it's not completely furnished to my taste and I haven't put up any posters yet I do feel at home here. That's quite strange; maybe I even feel more at home here than in Leiden. I think that's mostly because in Leiden I was constantly looking forward to the day that I could go to Japan, so living in Leiden was just something I did in the meantime. Now that I am in Japan, I'm not longing for anything - I'm happy to be here and I'll try to enjoy this year as much as possible. I feel comfortable in this surrounding, this big city and the people I meet here. I really hate it that I have to go back next summer, but maybe I'll think differently when that time comes.