24 Hours

In about 24 hours I’ll have passed through the passport control at Narita airport. I’m in a very odd mood. I’m extremely excited about seeing those that matter most to me again. But part of me wants to stay here and does not want to leave.

I can’t wait to see Gwen again on Monday in France, and friends and family before that in Vienna. I’m also looking forward to an interesting work related meeting I’ll be attending Sunday and Monday in Vienna. And I’m also very excited about the new job I will be starting soon in London. But I’m also thinking about all the things I like very much about Japan, the people I’ve met, and things I’m leaving behind and might never see again. And at the same time my todo list seems long enough to keep me busy for a week or more. The fact that I haven't started packing yet reminds me of my departure from Vienna about a year ago :-)

Last night my work colleagues celebrated my farewell (this time really). I’ll miss them. I’d like to take them with me. Here is a picture taken last night.



Tonight, or sometime within 24 hours I might have some time to upload more pictures. There were many I was planning to put on this blog, but never got around to do so. If I run out of time, then this will be my last post about Tsukuba Science City.

Today Günther (the last remaining Austrian in Tsukuba) was so nice to give me a quick tour of his work at AIST (AIST is the research facility I work at). The building is right next to ours, but it belongs to a completely different world. I always thought that we got the coolest hardware and equipment, but one of their machines is probably worth more than all our servers and stuff together, and their machines can do really fascinating things, too. Here is a picture of me dressed for the tour.



And here is a picture of Günther and one of those machines that allow him to do things that are way beyond the limits of my world.



I just realized that I probably won’t have time to upload any more pictures in the remaining time. Anyway, here are two random pictures I took today. The first one shows my office what it looks like before organizing and cleaning up all my files (which I'll be doing in the next hours). Actually I think I failed in taking a picture of the chaos on the hard drives, but just imaging a few terabytes of data distributed on many hard drives. Maybe one day I'll learn to work in an more organized way :-/



The second picture shows one of my favorite places at AIST. I’ve spent many hours reading papers in the sun at this pond. There are many fish in it, and sometimes a crane (“Kranich”) stops by, too.