1. i got in contact with one of the people who's from my school and is at the same japanese school i'll be going to. they've been there for 1 semester and they'll be there for my first semester there too. what i've learned from them is basically, the classes are SUPER SUPER easy because everyone expects that you're actually mostly going to learn just from talking to japanese people outside of class. there's almost no homework (some classes have NONE apparently), you can fill in worksheets by writing entirely in hiragana (no kanji) if you want and apparently some students aren't even doing the homework and the teachers don't care. the girl said they only have 8 students in the class, and it's incredibly easy to make japanese friends there.

through her i got the exchange blog of some guy who went there the year before.... honestly i can't read this blog. at all. it's extremely pretentious and irritatingly formal, and doesn't have any real info. like, i want to know how the classes are, how the dorm room is, how his actual interactions with japanese people are, how much japanese he's learning and whatnot but he's bascially talking about food and alcohol and then vaguely alluding to anything personal instead of just saying what happened. "i have class, class is normal" yeah thanks. but here it is, in case anyone wants to read it: https://ryuugakuseinokeiken.wordpress.com/

2. i might have solved the problem where i won't be able to eat any sugar / processed stuff in japan. after i started drinking a lot of mineral water(? naturally-carbonated spring water) instead of green tea, i noticed that i haven't gotten sick from eating sweet/processed foods. i mean, i still haven't eaten normal table sugar but i've tried coconut sugar and some weird sugar replacement (militol i think it was called), and also some "cream cheese" (actually oats and oat milk) that had rapeseed oil and some other oils i never eat anymore in it, and i didn't get sick afterwards. i also had some sausages (i normally get a tiny bit sick after sausages because of the preservatives in them) and didn't feel sick.

i WAS feeling sick for a few moments, especially after the militol thingy i had a sudden slight headache (like barely perceptible headache) and stuff. but it went away really fast. and likewise i could feel a sickly sugar-rush coming from the coconut sugar but i just made sure to drink the bubble-water as soon as i could, and it went away without any real problems. i was certain i'd not be able to sleep or that i'd get nightmares or something because i ate all tha stuff in like one day BUT I SLEPT FINE! literally the only difference has been the mineral water. my first thought was that the water's acidity must be instantly balancing out the sugar in the food or helping the processed stuff (like the rapeseed oil) break down before it even hits my stomach, or something like that. i tried researching it and COULDN'T FIND ANYTHING! or maybe this is my body's natural ability and i just had some certain mineral deficiency before?

now, these foods were the safest ones i could find (ex. sausages with 5 ingredients and natural intestine-casings, not 20 with synthetic casings), so it's not like i was eating american ice cream or something. but i know that japan uses way less sugar than sweden in the first place, so i'm thinking that as long as i only try "japanese" sweets (which typically contain little to no sugar) and keep carbonated water on-hand, i might be fine... the main problem i've been thinking about is just that, i'll need to be able to eat enough normal food to not seem rude to or inconvenience literally everyone i meet. you can always say you don't like sweets or that you get heartburn from fried foods, or even just that you only want to eat "authentic japanese food" when there, but saying you can't even eat like, basic traditional soup, is too tough. of course i'll still do my best to avoid processed foods while there, but i want to at least be able to TRY foods.

anyway. this was the first time in a long while i'd dared to try some foods that seemed like they'd obviously make me sick. and through this i realized... these foods everyone wants to eat taste like crap. i tried what was supposed to be a sort of dessert chocolate-cake thing, and a cream cheese replacement (made from oats but it tasted exactly like cream cheese to me), and a chocolate bar (mostly made of dates). i just came away with the feeling of "well it was worth trying for the experience i guess, but not exactly tasty". the cake also made my mouth dry, which was super irritating and is actually one of the signs to telling how what you're eating is processed. so i just felt like... wow, these things definitely aren't worth buying again. the memories i have of "tasty food" are all wrong; it may LOOK or SMELL tasty but it isn't once you actually eat it. so it makes me think, even if i did for some reason get back to the point where i could eat absolutely normal processed food again, i'd probably find it disgusting.