Suburban jungle Tokyo style :)

I did nothing but relax today. It was wonderful. I did feel a bit guilty at wasting an opportunity to look around the city, but I will make up for it later. Sometimes one needs to just lie in bed all day.

el perro corre por la carretera...

Had a very fun day today. I went to lunch with some of the people from the office and we spent one and a half hours chatting. I told them that if people speak slow enough I can understand the conversation. To which they instantly started reciting tongue-twisters -_- I'm pretty bad at those, but the one I remembered in Russian was - шла Саша по шоссе и сосала сушку (shla Sasha po shosse i sosala sushku). And one in Spanish that they really liked - el perro corre por la carretera.

This Sunday I was also invited to a barbecue party or rather football party? It will start in the morning with football and after 2-4 hours there will be food. I said I would cheer them on from the sidelines. No way am I going to run around in 30+ degree heat.

No new photos today, so here is one from Sunday. I like these types of angles.

Non-working day -_-

I came to work this Saturday even though it wasn't an official work day. I only found out when I got there. I guess, I misunderstood because people here work all hours of every day of the week, and the fact that my previous internship had a 6-day work week. Well, good for next week - I'll be able to visit more places.

I took a different road today as well, but it was too sunny and I had to walk up and down so many times ;;;;;;-_- It was very hot as well. They say Kumamoto is the hottest, but I see no difference between   it and Tokyo. It's seriously むしあつい here as well. Maybe not as むし but certainly あつい.

I stayed half the day at work trying to figure out the requirements for the competition. I had to manually translate all the names of the required areas. Lots of new words like 相互 （そうご）and 倉造（そうぞう）, 性能（せいのう） and 採用（さいよう）, and on and on. Kinda like this:

After I got home I could finally do some housework. I went to the nearest grocery store (Kinokuniya on 青山通り) that turned out to be soooooo expensive. I think I'm going to stick to コンビニ food from now on.

Tomorrow I want to go to Omotesando, since it's really close by. Also, Tokyo station has lots of famous architecture around it, so I might go there first. Aah, so many places to see, so little time... Good thing I have 3 more weekends to look around.

Very european looking building on my way from the store. It was so shiny and at the same time fuzzy - the picture doesn't look like the original at all. Tomorrow I hope to have fancier pictures to post.

Lab trip - day2

Part 2 of the Hiroshima trip. Another massive photo dump post.
Our accommodation was just a few minutes away from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park.
We took a group photo opposite the big fountain with a view towards the park. It turned out to be out graduation photo gift :)

Lab trip - day1

At the end of February our lab planned a trip to Hiroshima.
It took around 5 hours by bus, which meant I had to get up around 5 or 6 in the morning. The long ride meant I could sleep on the way so I didn't mind too much.
The first stop was 厳島神社 (Itsukushima shrine) - famous for it's torii that is surrounded by water during high tide. More on that later.

Entrance to the ferry towards Miyajima island.

Takachiho

A couple of weeks ago we went on a little trip. Mainly to Takachiho gorge.

This time we with some of the exchange students from my university.

Since I've been to this place before and took loads of pictures, I've decided to experiment and took videos. I'm in the process of editing an hour of footage and it's driving me crazy :) I guess it's kind of like a vlog video.

We got this guy to row our boat. Needless to say Shiv was pretty happy. Anyway, it was Jan's first attempt at rowing, but he was pretty awesome.

I'm hoping to finish the video within a month (haha yeeeah...) and post it to YouTube. However with the finals looming, I'm not so keen to spend hours on cutting up my shaky videos into something watchable.

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Weekend trip

Last Saturday we went on a small trip to Aso. It was raining really hard in the morning, so I felt a bit reluctant to go at first. But it was pretty fun, so I'm glad I did.

Plan A was to go photograph もみじ (maple trees) if the weather was good, plan B was to go eat 馬肉 (horse meat). When I first came to Japan, I was against eating cute pony meat. But as it turned out, horse meat is delicious. Nowadays I'm totally fine with it.

This is the restaurant we went to. The view is just amazing.

May

Already end of May. Time flies so fast, but it feels like one week takes ages.

University is far too busy here. I often have to go there on the weekends as well. I feel overwhelmed.

The weather is a bit annoying as well. I should really start getting ready for the rainy season and buy some rubber boots (and a better umbrella). I've already spent some days with totally wet feet.

Today was pretty nice tough. Quite warm and sunny. I have actually got a bit of a tan, although nothing too noticeable it seems. If I was in Latvia, I'd be pretty happy about it. But in Japan, white skin is considered more of a beauty standard, so you can see many girls and women walking round with parasols. Because of this, now that I finally don't look like a zombie, I'm afraid of getting too tanned. Ridiculous! Oh, the dilemma :)

In general, I think, I'm getting accustomed to university life. The biggest problem, of course, is the language barrier. There are only 2 people in my lab who speak English, some more people who can understand some amount of English, and the rest can't make out even a word.
One of the lectures has debates. Today we had the first one. It was pretty awful. I prepared for it a lot, but when it came to asking or answering questions, I couldn't help, because I couldn't understand when was the time to ask the question or what was the oppositions question to which I know the answer. Soooo frustrating.
But some of the students do sometimes express a desire to speak more English. And many help me by typing some of the stuff that's being said into a translator. I am infinitely grateful to them for that.

I keep forgetting about the blog. Plus, I rarely get a lot of free time. But maybe now I'll try tracking my study process more, so that'll give me more opportunity to write :)

University festival

This weekend we went to the University festival up on the hill.

On Saturday they had the girls' beauty contest - 'our' girl won. On Sunday - the boys' (dressed up as girls) beauty contest. The guy in the white wig was hilarious. Didn't bother to see who won that time. Among other activities there were lots of bands, even an orchestra (I think they played some anime music), karaoke contest, some sort of event with dressing up in traditional clothes, and lots more.

Shiori-san's band was playing on Saturday. This time around I could hear her voice properly - really great. Got a bracelet-like thing that glows in a dark.

We ate lots of usual stall food. Mmmmmm takoyaki...

Sunday evening they had fireworks. They were supposed to start at 7pm, and we tried our best to wait until then. But we got hungry and super sleepy (because we're trying to be like normal people, and waking up earlier), so we left a bit before 7. The thing was, it seems the fireworks only began at 8pm. Good thing we didn't bother waiting.

Ate dinner at the pasta place. It was packed and we could only get a tiny table. It was very hard to juggle our food around. But very tasty. Except for the time I started choking. Remember kids - don't talk while you're eating. Or at least, not when your mouth is full of gooey cheesy rice.

What I did the last couple of weeks

Haven't written in a long time. Let's see - a couple of weeks ago we went to see one of Shiv's students perform with her band at a live-house. That was on a Friday (23, Oct). I've never been to a live-house before, and we sort of got lost while trying to find it. The place was rather small, and the speakers were unnecessarily loud, I felt. I got a bit of a headache from it - couldn't even hear some of the singing over all that noise.

Shiori-san (the student) does have a nice voice. It was funny, because almost all of her family came to see her - sister, father, grandfather, and, I think, even her grandmother. Her dad was filming her a lot.

The thing I liked the most was the lights though.

Then, the next weekend (30-31, Oct) we went to Shimonoseki to watch the musical. Had to get up super early - 6:40 it was. On Saturday I walked around the shopping mall a bit. I like it better than the one here, possibly because it's smaller. I was super tired though so just slept in the hotel until Shiv came from the rehearsal. We went to eat some korean food. The lady took pity on a poor foreigner, and made the dish very mild (by korean standards, of course).

Sunday was the day of the performance. It was in the afternoon though, so we checked out of the hotel. I had to spend around 6 hours, waiting for the time to pass. Mostly sat in the shopping mall at one of the tables. Went out for snacks and a bit of drawing. Got the attention of a one year old kid. Later on some middle-school boys came up, and tried spying on my drawing. It was a bit annoying and distressing, but in retrospect - very funny.

Got to the hall ok, but had to wait in line some 20 minutes. When they finally started the performance, I wasn't sure if I went to the right place. There were some opera singers from Korea(?) on stage. They did 3 songs - a duet and two solos. The ladies dress was a modern interpretation of the hanbok - so lovely. Her voice was amazing as well. The guy was a bit funny with all those exaggerated movements.

After they finished there were some speeches by some really important dudes. It was incredible how after the speaker would say "good evening", everyone in the hall would respond with the same phrase. Kind of like kindergarten. And all that bowing...

Anyway, the musical itself was kind of fun, even though I couldn't understand many things. Shiv was hilarious in his role as Sakamoto-san. Seems he couldn't remember some of the movements for the crowd scene dances, nor lyrics to the songs.

After the stage we went for dinner with some of the people from the musical. The waitress totally forgot about my order, and only brought it after Shiv asked about it. Discrimination! :D

The stage dragged on longer than we expected, because of all the speeches and singing. We couldn't take the train, and had to go back to the hotel again. All my waiting was in vain, could've slept at the hotel...

The 10th of October (Wed) was a holiday here. We went to the shopping centre, but Shiv caught a cold, so we didn't stay long. Found awesome cotton leggings - promised I'd bring back some back to Latvia for my mom and sis. The weather was nice, and we decided to sit on a riverbank near the castle for a while. I got bitten on the knee.

On Friday we went to Kumamoto university to talk with a professor there. Need to translate some of my documents and prepare a CV. Hopefully, I can get it done by mid week.

Now we're both a bit sick. Did absolutely nothing this weekend.