Campus, Aeon, etc

I'll talk about AIU Campus a little bit. By population it's smaller then my High School (only 700 students or so). About 130 students are foreign exchange students, interestingly enough the exchange is 1-to-1, meaning for every student at AIU there is one student studying at my home instituion (which would be SUNY oswego because of how I applied into the program).

The school has 3 dorms, first there is Komachi Hall which is a freshman Dorm but some international students stay here as well. It has the strictest rules of the dorms when it comes to vistitors. Floors are seperated by gender, and people of the opposite gender are not allowed to stay on the floors at night. If a visitor is staying overnight, they have to complete paperwork, so its stract. The 2nd dorm is Global Village which is where I am staying and a lot of other international students, its a pretty nice apartment with a bedroom, a bathroom, bath, and a small kitchen. My roommate still has not arrived, and I assume once he does things will get a little more crowded. The 3rd dorm is University Apartments, don't know much about them since they are closed to international students and there is no information about them in English. The only thing I know about them is that they are the only dorms on campus that you can smoke inside of.

The campus cafeteria serves meals 3 times a day to students on the meal plan. It also has a restaurant Menu from which things can be purchased, I have yet to try that. There is also the "University Cafe" which sells food during the day, and works as the campus bar at night (Very similar to the "University Cafe" at Stony Brook). Its closed on the weekends, so I haven't tried anything there either. There is also the University convencie store known as the "Kiosk" (Its not actually a Kiosk, just called that way). It sells a wide vareity of sweets, snacks, pens, pencils, notebooks, Soap, Shampoo, and other convenice things. I've been going there trying the different things that they sell.

Two buses run from campus every few hours, one goes to "Aeon", a large Mall 15 minutes away. I went there once, its not too exsiding, it has McDonalds, KFC, Starbucks, and a bunch of other places to eat as well as a Supermarket, shoe stories, clothes stores. I went there looking for a few things, and one thing I realized is make sure you know how to say what you're looking for in the local language. I did not find what I was looking for only to discover that it was sold at the "Kiosk" later. The 2nd bus goes to "Wada Station", from there it is possible to take a train to Akita City. I was going to do that today before discovering that I lost my bus schedule. This is somewhat of a problem since the buses run rather rarely and their destiantions are not written in English (Not in Tokyo anymore), the only way I can identify that this is the right bus is based on the time that it arrived. I will definitely visit Akita city during the week, unfortunately neither local trains nor buses run on Sundays so I can't do it tomorrow. On the other hand I did sign up for an optional trip tomorrow with "Community outrach services" to an Agricultural Festival, no idea what to expect, but that is part of the experience.