Arrival to Japan

So here I am, a guy from Spain in Nagoya!! :) As you may know from previous posts I am going to spend two years here granted by a Japanese government scholarship.

I arrived at Nagoya (Japan) 3rd April 2009, after a very tiring trip of 30 hours involving:

• Santander->Madrid: I used the train because I thought it was probably the most secure way to get to Madrid in time. The new train to Madrid is called Alvia and in the last part of the journey it reaches speeds of 200 km/h, making it to Madrid in only four hours. The seats are also very comfortable and it is not very expensive (46 Eur one way) so I think that it was a good choice.
• Madrid airport: To make sure I would catch the flight I went to Madrid the day before as my flight was at 9 am. I arrived at the airport at 00:30 and found a nice corner to lay down.
• Madrid->Frankfurt: First I had to go to Frankfurt through an Spanair flight and then make the transfer.
• Frankfurt->Nagoya: Fortunately there are flights directly to Nagoya so I didn't have to go to Tokyo or Osaka and then use a train. The 11 hours flight to Nagoya was not bad. I was sitting down with an old Japanese grandmother with whom I had very nice conversations in basic Japanese. I also played some PSP games and I even managed to sleep a bit.
  

When I arrived to Nagoya airport, I changed money (unfortunately the rate is horrible at the moment), took the Meitetsu train line to Kanayama and changed to the subway's Meijo line to Nagoya University to visit the people from my future laboratory. I met there Ms. Kanematsu, the secretary of Prof. Takada's Laboratory, who has been helping me a lot for getting this scholarship (thanks a lot!). She showed me my desk and then she took me to my residence. Other students were going to see the Cherry blossom (hanami) but I was very tired so I decided to stay at the residence to rest. In the residence, there were voluntary students that were very nice to me and showed me my room and solved any doubts I could have.


As I was hungry I went out to a nearby convenience store and bought some instantaneous ramen. I also had to bought a pan to boil water and other stuff. If you want to read more, subscribe to my blog and wait for the next posts!! :)