Hello,
I am planning to do a semester abroad in Japan. We got the option to choose from a few different dorms, some of them providing an optional meal plan. I am wondering if a meal plan is worth and hope that you can help me.
So the meal plan costs approx. 17,5k yen a month. We get breakfast and dinner six days a week, except for national holidays. The food looks good, but nothing out of ordinary. Still good tho. Of course I will also be travelling from time to time, so I won’t be able to eat every meal provided.
What’s your opinion on this situation?
Thanks! 🙂
8 comments
Remember that you’ll want to try all kinds of foods and restaurants. I knew some people on a mealplan and they all regretted it as they hardly ate out (since it’d be a waste of money). Eating out is also not expensive, and if you have facilities to cook you can definitely stay until 20k a month while being free to eat whatever you want.
The cost almost sounds like as if you don’t have a mealplan. Just cook yourself, try to be independent.
What I would want to know is what the facilities are like for self-catered dorms. Japanese kitchens can feel weirdly under-equipped even at the best of times, and I imagine that dorm kitchens can vary wildly. If the self-catered option means sharing a small stove and a small fridge with a dozen other students, then I would find it hard to cook regularly.
I also know myself, and that I find it hard to motivate myself to cook at home, especially when sharing kitchens with others. Even though it’s cheaper to cook for yourself, it won’t be if you end up eating out a lot anyway, out of convenience.
Just some things to factor into your decision.
17500 yen per month divided by 2 meals per day divided by 6 days per week comes out to about 1460 yen per meal, and that’s if you take advantage of every breakfast and every dinner you can. Some days you might sleep in and miss breakfast. Some days you might feel like eating out in the neighbourhood somewhere. Some days you might feel like making something yourself. If that’s the case, that average cost per meal goes up and the value proposition goes down as a result.
I don’t know about you, but for breakfasts I’d rather not have to get washed and dressed and then leave my home to go eat in some public cafeteria every day. Maybe some times, but no way I’d want to be in there 6 days a week.
For dinner, it depends on what cooking options you have. A lot of dorms have rules against anything more than an electric hotplate so your options may be limited to eating out or convenience store bentos.
I have a feeling the dinner is going to go to waste a lot of the time. Remembering my own time as an exchange student, there were many times when I wanted to eat dinner with friends/was invited to some sort of event in the evening/had a date/whatever. If I had to worry about missing dinner every time, I might have missed out on a lot of fun stuff I did during that time.
Unless you are in the deepest Inaka, there are cheap restaurants and konbinis on almost every corner. You might end up paying a bit more then the 365 JPY per meal that you worked out in another comment. But 500-800 JPY gets you a decent meal almost anywhere in Japan and it gives you a lot more flexibility, which is invaluable imo.
Ok not sure how your school will be, but mine had set times for meals, like 7-9:30am breakfast, 11-1:30pm lunch, 4:30-7pm dinner, and some days my schedule didn’t work with that. My home university was just open like 6am-10pm, so I’d just eat my meals whenever I felt like it, I preferred that way.
For me the amount of time invested in shopping, cooking, cleaning wasn’t worth it and I didn’t regret at all taking the meal plan.
You still have lunch and Sundays to discover new types of food. And you can always have dinner early (around 6pm) and then go out saving some money in food.