I live alone in a small apartment in an eight-story apartment complex. It’s called Global Village and is one of the three dormitories of NUFS, besides the International House and NUFS-NUAS-residence. NUFS itself as well as the nearest convenience store and supermarket can be reached in five minutes by foot.
We are around 70 people this year and, aside from a few Japanese resident assistants (RA’s) and the administrative staff, only international students live here. Although my room is way smaller than what I had back at home, I still like it as it has everything I might need and I can shut the door to work (or laze around) completely undisturbed.
The apartment is divided into two; a small entry area from which the bathroom can be entered and the main room. There’s not really much to say about either of them, the bathroom has a toilet, a mirror that’s hanging way too low for me, and a bathtub/shower combination. It’s kinda small, but I don’t spent much time there anyway so that’s not a problem.
The main room has a bed with bedding included, an open shelf, a wardrobe and a desk with drawers. There’s also a small balcony attached which probably makes smokers really happy, but I use it to dry my stuff and glance outside at the highway running right next to the dorm. It’s really loud outside, but the windows are new so they isolate pretty well.
Rent is really cheap at 250 Euros/month with utilities included. I get around 100 Mbit/s from the WiFi network, but there’s also a LAN socket next to the desk which I might try out in the future. It’s also interesting to note how Japanese doors work: the key turns in the exact opposite direction as in Germany and you turn the key once and then turn it BACK again to remove it.
You may have noticed that my room doesn’t include a kitchen. This is no problem though as we have shared communical kitchens across each floor. Each kitchen has four workspaces and two refrigerators divided between everyone including multiple tables in the center so you always have enough room to work. Shared appliances include two rice cookers, two microwaves (電子レンジ/denshi renji in Japanese - sounds really funny imo), four induction stoves and a small oven to make toast. Oh, and we also have an electric water heater which is essential for my daily cup ramen dinner. Each workspace has a sink and a private drawer where you can put stuff like kitchen-/tableware or non-refrigerated ingredients.
We don’t have a dishwasher unfortunately which, in combination with weird garbage rules like needing to wrap every. single. piece. of food stuff and waste into a plastic bag before throwing it away, makes cooking more complicated stuff annoying quite quickly.