15th day - first day of class

Hey everyone!

Hope you are all well.

The 26th of September was our first day of lessons in Waseda.
We had already gone through our first course signup session (there were two more) so it was time for us to see if the courses we signed up for were suitable or if we needed to change some in the next sign up session.
I will go into the course selection and settling in process in another post soon!
Please don't hesitate to prod me if I don't get around to it soon!

We had our first lunch break at Waseda this day! Most of our lessons are in building 22 and just across from that building is a little shop that sells bento for around 400 to 500 yen (£2.55-£3.18).

We ate in one of the classrooms in building 22. If you can find an empty classroom then you can eat, sleep, study or catch up on unfinished homework in there.

This Bento was so good!

This bento came with fried chicken with egg mayonnaise. Under the chicken were some vegetables and pasta. The little cup of peas, sweetcorn and carrot was really nicely seasoned and boiled to a perfect softness for me. The rice portion was large and had a nice sprinkling of sesame seeds. The purple-pink stuff in the lower right corner was tsukemono (pickles). I actually really like Japanese pickles, they are salty with the right amount of sourness. The bento at this little shop are always really nice! 

After getting through some of my bento I got really thirsty. One of my friends told me there was a vending machine in the building so I ran down the stairs to the nearest one. I always like to try new things so I picked the most curious drink on offer. This one was called Real Gold, as I expected from the lightning on the can, it was an energy drink. The flavour was not that much different from Red Bull so I liked it. And seeing as that day was my first day of classes in months, the energy was well needed to get past the shock to the system!

This drink had added vitamin C, B2 and B6. It seems quite common for drinks in Japan to have added vitamins in them from what I have seen in vending machines and shops.

The view from building 22 in Waseda

After our lessons we decided to treat ourselves to some cake at the nearby cake shop. This shop is only 2 minutes from my dorm and I had been salivating over it as I passed it most days. We had also had a long day - we had all 5 periods!

This cake shop is so cute and looks like something from straight out of a Japanese drama!

The cakes all look so nice even though they are only 300-400 yen!

My cake all boxed up nice and safely... before I attacked it like a savage beast!

My cake!

I was hoping that they had strawberry shortcake but they unfortunately didn't have any! Japanese strawberry shortcake is actually a strawberry cream sponge cake so it doesn't actually have anything to do with shortcake! So instead I got this Fruits of the forest cake.
It was really nice but I wish the sponge had just been a bit softer and a tad more moist. The flavours, however, were great and the fruits on top were fresh.

Amy and I ate our cakes inside my dorm's common area. I am lucky that my dorm has an area where I can invite guests!

As usual, I always like to have a drink with baked treats so I ran outside to the vending machine outside my dorm to buy one. I am pretty sure in Japan you are never further than 100 meters from a vending machine!

As usual I wanted to choose something mysterious. Also I usually like to drink milk with cake and this bottle had a kanji from milk on the label so I chose this one. 

It turned out that it was similar to yakult which was good and after a check the kanji confirmed that it was a probiotic drink which made sense.

Well, see you for now!