Rosanzerusu

Yesterday we started learning Katakana in the Japanese class. Katakana is used to write foreign (imported) words in Japanese. Rondon is how the Japanese write London (I think the R-L issue is well known...). Rosanzerusu (ro-sa-n-ze-ru-su are the syllables, the last "u" is silent) is Los Angeles. And can you guess what Makudonarudo is? :-)
(Although, normally a short version of that is used.)

Here is a picture I took in class yesterday.



The teacher is the one with the tie. The people on the picture are from Japan (teacher), Brazil, Armenia, Poland, Sweden, Thailand, China, and Bangladesh.

Here is a picture taken inside the elevator at Ninomiya house.



It speaks English and Japanese, but only during day times (so it doesn't bother anyone at night). And it has an undo function! Assume you pressed 8 (where I live) and in addition 7 by mistake. Then you can press 7 again, the button will start blinking, and then if you press it again the 7 will be deselected. And I was told that the elevators have a special earthquake program. In case of a stronger earthquake they will automatically move to the next closest floor (up or down) open their doors, and refuse any further operation (because of the danger that they might crash).

I wonder if tourist guides in Vienna should put the Pater Noster (at the NIG building of the University of Vienna) on their list of things you must see for Japanese tourists. They will probably find it hard to believe that there is an elevator which has no doors, and which you need to jump in and out of (because it never stops...) And can you imagine a group of 20 Japanese tourists trying to jump into the Pater Noster and taking pictures doing so? :-)

Here is a picture of my most recent food experiment.



Once I find things I like (through random sampling) in a supermarket I usually explore similar items. As I have no clue what is really similar I use the physical distance (in centimeters) as similarity function. The crackers on the left were fine (some kind of see food), they were located close to the nuts I like. The drink on the right is something I probably wont try again. It was located right next to the orange juice which I like very much... can you guess what it is? :-)

And here are some pictures from last weeks capoeira training. There are more pictures on the ABADA Ibaraki website.