Early Days

My early days in Japan were quite stressful. While the campus itself was stunning in terms of beauty and design, I finally had the time and energy to begin coming to grips with being in a new country without any support systems. For the first time in my life, I was somewhere my mom couldn’t reach me in person, and because of the time difference, we weren’t able to call consistently either. Another issue I had early on was trying to figure out what and where to eat. The AIU cafeteria was an amazing place to eat, of course, and I would eventually discover the phenomenal AIU Cafe where I would eat almost every day for brunch, but unfortunately I have sensory issues that are most prominent with taste, touch, and texture. This, as can be imagined, has left me with a lot of foods I cannot eat, and since I didn’t want to eat only rice (as rice was always an option in the cafeteria) and water for dinner, finding nearby restaurants was a priority after I had finished settling in and gotten used to the campus.

One of the more stressful parts of being on campus was that I was one of very few transfer students going completely alone. Almost every other transfer student had another student from their college (usually a friend) traveling with them, and so it was incredibly difficult to find other students to talk to and make friends with. For the first two or so weeks, I spent most of my time just exploring the campus and trying to make sure that I would be able to make it to my classes on time, but if it weren’t for the honeymoon phase I was in, the loneliness would have been overwhelming. 

Luckily for me, however, during the last two days of orientation, I ended up being sat behind two people who would end up becoming great friends of mine during our time at AIU, Isabelle and Colin (I have left their last names out to protect their privacy), two fellow Americans who live on the East Coast. They took the time to reach out to me first and talk to me about our orientation sessions, but also about a deeply hilarious yet somewhat disturbing occurrence that had been going on within the bathrooms of one of the dorms at their college. If you have ever lived on the campus of a college before, I am sure, dear reader, you will have some understanding of what atrocities college students are capable of committing in a dorm bathroom. After finishing with the orientation sessions for the day, we ended up going on a walk around the campus and also going down one of the trails that went through the forest. Thankfully for us, the bears were still hibernating at the time and would continue to do so until the last two months of our time there, but that’s another matter for a later post.

The orientation in general was quite well done; it explained what we needed to do, all the opportunities the college provided, and also pointed out some early events that we could go to. I did my best to attend every event I could in the early days, hoping it might help me to make some more friends. Unfortunately, one of these events, a new and transfer student dinner event, ended up doing too well and had so many people that I ended up getting completely overwhelmed and stood off to the side and didn’t end up making any friends at the event. However, while I didn’t end up making any friends, Isabelle and Colin ended up meeting and becoming friends with another fellow American named Michael, who would end up being another friend of mine. From this point onwards, the four of us would hang out together constantly and meet up for meals and other events on campus.

Michael, Isabelle, and Colin ended up really making my time at AIU worth it. They were all great friends to me, and I don’t think I would have loved my time there anywhere near as much if I had not met them.

I have spoken a little earlier in this post about the beauty of the AIU campus, but I don’t think my words alone can do it justice, so to finish off this post about my earliest days at AIU, I am going to attach below some photos I took while at AIU. While I am no photographer, I think the beauty more than outweighs my poor photo-taking skills.