Three Months

Wow, 3 months have passed like 3 weeks. Saturday I'm Vienna. I might not have many chances to check my emails until Monday in a week.

Last weekend I had a chance to enjoy karaoke with some of the capoeiristas. It was very different to what I expected. First of all, they are awesome singers. Second, they are extremely polite when it comes to making you feel good about making a fool of yourself (they just clap their hands louder to the rhythm, or try to sing along even if they don't know English and have never heard the song before). It was great fun. At the end they even decided to sing a Christmas song just because they wanted to sing something where everyone (including me) could sing along... :-)

Last weekend Doug, his wife, another American, and me walked up the Tsukuba hill (<900m). It's a nice walk through beautiful forests. It's the main tourist attraction in Tsukuba area.

Here are some pictures. The first is the karaoke machine (the phone book is a book full of Japanese songs). The second shows the car which that plant was trying to cover up. (Unfortunately the gardeners recently decided to stop it.) The rest of the pictures is from the walk.















Finally, here is a picture within AIST. The panel shows how much power is consumed and how much of it is generated by the solar plants. The picture was taken on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Usually the value is around 0-2% (at that time it was an amazing 13.24%). Maybe the servers crashed ;-)

Blue Traffic Lights

Foreigners (like me) have been telling me how hard it is to pass the driving license test. There seems to be some consensus that you must fail (at least) twice before you can pass, no matter how perfect you drive. I've been told that the Japanese examiners seem to believe that a foreigner can impossible be a good driver (even if he or she has been driving in his home country for 20 years)...

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that the Japanese traffic lights are red, yellow (or orange), and blue. This "blue" is very similar to the color of grass or leaves, but it's not green... it's blue. I'd say it's green, just like everywhere else in the world... but every Japanese I've asked so far told me it's blue.

Here are some pictures... the first one is the smallest capoeirista in uniform I've ever seen :-) He's the son of our trainer. BTW, how do you get small kids to look into the camera when you take a picture?? (Picture was taken on Saturday.)



Today (Sunday) we had a Capoeira workshop in Tokyo. It was great. Lot's of people... lot's of capoeiristas to play with. Here are two pictures of us in the train to Tokyo.





A picture of us warming up before the workshop...



And here is a picture after we succeeded with our Japanese culture experiment. What we did is leave a backpack (the one in the picture) with a video camera, car keys, etc. in the Yamanote line (the one that circles Tokyo). An hour later (we asked the train officers when the train would come around again) we checked to see if the bag was still there... and it was! Try that in any other city of a similar size anywhere in Europe, South or North America! ;-)
In London I'm sure they destroy it without checking it's contents (I think they call that procedure "terrorism"). In Barcelona the bag would probably disappear before we'd get a chance to start the experiment...



And one last word about cleanliness... because I just cant believe it. Smokers sometimes carry their own ashtray with them. Even in Tokyo!!!! (So they don't ash on the roads!!!!)

Buckets of Rain

Today, finally, we are enjoying the long anticipated official start of the rainy season. I’m a bit too lazy to write much so I’m adding mostly pictures.

These two pictures show the car of an AIST researcher who has been working very hard lately. In fact, he has been working so hard and for so long, that weed has started to grow over his car. (Goto’s interpretation is that the researcher is probably at some conference.) In any case, those pink flowers are everywhere. It’s amazing! First we had the cherry blossoms, then lots of roses, and now those (if I remember correctly then they are called “zuzushi”). I wonder what’s next.





Here are some pictures I took when I was cycling home late at night one day (both within AIST).





And here is a picture of my dinner yesterday (at AIST). Although we eat something different everyday it usually has the same structure: a bowl of rice, soup, a main dish, a cup of tea (or glass of water or both), and some side dish… oishi!



This picture was taken at Cork Head’s maybe about two weeks ago (we went out for some beers after capoeira). Tomorrow there is a capoeira workshop in Tokyo. I’m sure that will be lots of fun.