Since I’m a student of Doshisha University I wanted an apartment close to Imadegawa campus in northern Kyoto. Doshisha itself cannot help graduate students with student dormitories. So when I came to Japan, my head was full of ideas of what kind of place I wanted, AC, internet, location, pricing, the amount of tatami etc. I really believed myself to have planned this quite rigorously. Most of my friends and classmates live close to school in apartments and dorms they have found through accommodation agencies around Doshisha.

What happened to me is however completely different. Something randomly occurred and changed everything. To make a very long and interesting story shorter:

During my bachelor studies, I was a mentor for a Japanese exchange student in Sweden. Now while I have arrived in Japan, his family kindly offered to help me find an apartment in Kyoto. They gave me a list of apartments around Doshisha but also mentioned that they had an old Japanese house in the outskirts of Kyoto that has been empty for quite some time, so they offered me to stay there! After going to the place and having a look, I found the deal amazing! And the bath has a control panel…! I have thus moved to Yamashina-ku (eastern part of Kyoto) behind Higashiyama. It takes about 35 min for me to commute by bicycle to school.

Oh talking about bicycling, I went to Eirin. A chain-store company with funky shops all around the city. It just happened to be working a guy from Finland there who spoke both Japanese and English perfectly. I spend about an hour in there and came out with a second-hand mountain bike!