And the madness begins

Well, I am officially moved into my dorm at Waseda University. My room is teeeeny tiiiiny, but it's a single and contains a bathroom, so I'm good :) I'm pretty sure the streets around here are gonna confuse me for awhile (Japanese streets don't usually have names--the blocks around them have numbers), and we'll see if I can find my dorm once I've left it for a walk. It's apparently the newest one built, and it is a little intimidating. It's all white with black doors for residents and white doors for everything else. But seriously. All white. And the dryer only takes one kind of change--we'll see how that goes....

The real story for the evening is how I ended up here. I've flown a lot, fortunately, and having the experiences of flying on my own many times and flying with my family to France made the airport madness nonexistent. Easy. Also, finding the Waseda students who were picking me up at the airport was easy! I thought--great! Home free!

And then they surprised me; there were three of them, but all three had to wait to pick up more students. So, they sent me by myself on a train to Shinjuku, and they told me I would find more Waseda students there to see me through the rest of the journey.

Now, if you've never been to Shinjuku (which I certainly hadn't until today), it is HUGE. I got off my train and went to the main floor to look for the people I was supposed to meet. They weren't there, and I couldn't find a way back to the platform. I asked the cop who was working in the Shinjuku police box where they might be, but he had no idea. So I followed the instructions that I had copied from Waseda's website in case of such emergency.

When I got to the next stop, I couldn't find any escalators, and the signs pointing to my train took me to the stairs. As I struggled with my suitcase, a kindly old man came and helped me down the stairs. He asked where I was headed and told me he was going the same way (whether or not that was true, I'll never know). He took me all the way to Waseda, and then found some students who knew where an international dorm was.

One of those students spoke English very well, fortunately, and she helped me find the dorm while her two guy friends carried my heavier bags. When we finally got there, though, it was the wrong dorm. The people at the dorm showed me to my dorm, and finally, I was shown to my room.

Later that evening, the students who were supposed to have picked me up came by my room; I went to dinner with them (though I was so full from crappy airline food, I couldn't eat). It was difficult to keep up with their conversation, and occasionally they would slow down to include me, but I had a nice time just being around people.

Moral of the story: people here are super-friendly and helpful. I felt very lucky to have made it to my dorm.