Golden Week Pt III - The City of Okayama

The last day of our Golden Week was dedicated to the city of Okayama itself. It may not be so big and exciting, but it does have a nice castle with a very beautiful and big garden next to it.
The castle was built in the 16th century, and it's also called the "crow castle" because of its black appearance. I thought it looked kind of cool like this. Inside was a decent Samurai exhibition. Here are a few pictures:

Even more interesting than the castle was the "Korakuen" park which is located directly next to the castle. This is rather famous throughout Japan, and has small ponds, hills, creeks, cherry and maple trees, as well as lots of flowers, all in a very quiet and peaceful environment. Definitely a good conclusion of our trip!

Golden Week Pt II - Of Caves and islands, too many bridges, and not enough bikes

After our cultural explorations on the first day, on days 2 and 3 we set out to experience some of the beautiful nature around Okayama. The first trip was to a cave called "ikurado", in fact quite a big cave. Or maybe I should better say "long", because parts were really narrow, which quickly reminded me of the disadvantages of being a western guy: my body size! Our friend Keiko-san also joined us on this day, and even drove us around with her car. This made it easy to visit two other quite remarkable spots: One of the nice Okayama beaches, and also a viewpoint on top of a mountain, from which we could see the bay, including the big bridge leading to Shikoku (the smallest of Japan's 4 major islands). A tasty Sushi dinner concluded this day nicely.

The next day, our plan was to travel to Onomichi (1 hour from Okayama) for biking. Onomichi is starting point of an "island road", meaning a series of small islands that are connected by bridges, ultimately connecting the main island Honshu with Shikoku. The islands and also the bridges have trails made specifically for the purpose of biking, so I thought this sounded like a good plan. The only thing I had forgotten about was that it was Golden Week, and we were not the only people having had this idea. So, when we got there, all the rentable bikes were already gone.. Having learned about this, we decided not to let this ruin our day, and went on to explore one of the islands by ferry and bus. The island was an extremely quiet place, I almost couldn't believe this was still Japan. We visited two places here: A quite nice flower garden, but more impressively a small castle at the very top of the mountain. What made the castle special was its completely being embedded within wild nature, quiet different from the castles I had visited before.

Golden Week Pt. I - Kurashiki

Two weeks ago, Japan was celebrating what is called the "Golden Week": A series of 4 holidays that are not really related to each other, but happen to fall within one week. By taking just a couple days of paid time off, many Japanese make this their longest time off in the year. As for myself and Kayo, we just stuck with the regular holidays, and used the chance to spend four days in and around Okayama. Okayama-city lies in a less populated area, and as it turned out, a place like this is a smart choice for spending one's Golden Week. The reason: Around Golden Week, all of Japan's major places are just packed with people! Knowing how busy places like Osaka or Tokyo are on "normal" weekends, I really didn't want to experience it on Golden Week... Okayama was also busy of course, but still felt somehow relaxing. The plan for the first day was a visit to the nearby Kurashiki for its very beautiful historic town. Traditional white wooden houses are arranged along a small Koi-inhabitated river, and there are plenty of small shops selling hand-crafted Japanese goods. Well, you can see for yourself in these pictures:

One more thing that's worth noting was a wedding ceremony on the river, which looked quite extraordinary (I first thought it was acted, but apparently it was real). Unfortunately I didn't get a good view of it, but at least you can see the bride from the side:

More cherries (& some monkeys)

Around here, the Sakura season lasts about 2 weeks, at least when taking advantage of the different blooming times at different locations. Needless to say that the events from two blog entries ago weren't the only cherry-related events I would be attending: A week later, we went to Arashiyama (嵐山, the "stormy mountain") in Kyoto, which refers to a very beautiful area a little outside of Kyoto. There is a river including a prominent bridge, and alongside the river are some trails and parks that are perfect to enjoy the cherry blossoms.

A trip to Arashiyama would not be complete without visiting the "Monkey Mountain", a mountain containing a big monkey compound. The top of the mountain is about the same height as Kyoto Tower if I remember correctly. After climbing there, one enters something like a reverse monkey cage: Here, the people go in the cage, and the monkeys gather around! This is quite funny, one keeps wondering who is watching who at this place.. Though I guess the monkeys mostly came there to be fed from inside the cage.

interACT Signing Ceremony

An event that's already a few weeks past: on Apr 9 the interACT agreement, as part of which I'm here in Japan right now, was officially signed with NAIST. It was quite a big event in fact, we had some important visitors from Germany (the KIT president and two professors). After the signing ceremony itself, there was a lab tour for the German visitors, and also a meeting of Michael and myself (the first representatives of this new cooperation) with the president. I hope it has also left an impression on some Japanese students, so that we might meet some of them in Germany sometime!

Sakura sakura

Looks like I'm running behind a bit writing posts, there's just too much going on these days. Well, 2 weeks ago we went for the お花見 ("o-hanami", flower viewing, of course referring to the famous cherry blossoms).
Around that time, the cherry blossoms had finally decided to show. A bit late, but fortunate for me, since it allowed me to witness the complete cherry blossom season this time. The scenery we chose couldn't have been nicer: The big park around Osaka castle, which is a great place to go any time of the year, with lots of green, spots to walk or rest, and of course the impressive castle itself. Adding all the cherry trees in full bloom to a place like this made it easy to understand why cherries are such a big deal in Japan. That being said, it's not surprising that we were not the only people among the 2.6 million Osaka-jins that decided to use a sunny Sunday afternoon to visit the park..

The second お花見-related event I want to write about is our lab picnic last week. Staff and students drove to the nearby Keihanna Park, and brought one of those big blue plastic sheets to sit on. Each brought their own obentou-lunchboxes which we then enjoyed while talking and watching the cherries.  Here are some pictures:

ここ どこ？

Koko doko ("here where?" = where am I?). Like last time, I live in Ikoma, which is in Nara Prefecture (next to Osaka). Ikoma is a tiny city of just about 120,000 inhabitants (yep, in Japan that's tiny). Actually, I don't even really live inside that tiny town, it's more like a quiet spot across the mountains which still happens to belong to Ikoma. This quiet spot is part of a larger area where my university as well as a number of research institutions are located in what is called Keihanna Science Town.
Michael has created a nice map which you can find here:

My University is called NAIST, which is short for Nara Institute of Science and Technology. In Japanese it's 奈良先端科学技術大学院大学 (Nara-sentan-kagaku-gijutsu-daigakuin-daigaku), but even the Japanese don't want to pronounce that... NAIST is a rather small graduate school, and there are about 1000 master's and doctoral students in the fields of computer science, biology, and materials science. Despite (or maybe because of) the small size, it has gained a pretty good reputation for it's computer science program, and I think it was a good choice to come here. At my lab, there is one professor and 3 assistant professors who are in charge of around 20 students, so the supervision is very good. It's really more like a team working together, there's less of a distance between professors and students like in Germany.
Well, here are some pictures of my room (especially noteworthy: the cleaning sign for my door. No cleaning, taking out the garbage, or changing sheets for the next 6 months!).

This is the university and my lab:

First Impressions

I had the chance to buy an SD card reader on Sunday at Yodobashi Camera (which is probably the most enormous electronics store I'll ever see, with 7 or 8 stories!). So, here are just a few pictures of my first days.

747-400, pretty impressive airplane:

On Thursday night, my first night in Japan, despite me being all jetlaggy, we already set out to breathe some Osaka air (and eat the obligatory Okonomiyaki-food):

Most students had been attending a conference in Kyoto during the week, so I didn't meet most of them until Friday evening. They were all really friendly, and on Friday night we had a little lab party (Okonomiyaki again!). It was supposed to be a birthday party for Michael (the other German from Karlsruhe) and also my welcome party.

Re-Intro

Dear all,

because of several requests I have decided to revive this blog to share some about my life in Japan. It will be in English from now, although it may not make much of a difference because I mostly want to share photos anyways.

Well, once again I have arrived in Japan! I did some math, and found out it was actually my 9th time sitting in an airplane towards Japan, and I have already spent something like 374 days here! So, I guess it's not really a new experience anymore, since I've already had the chance to collect lots of impressions about this country before. Still, I'm sure life here will be exciting, as I'm living and working in a new environment, get to  know new people, and have yet many things to learn about Japan. My hope is also to get my language skills up to a somewhat fluent level, and also be able to read most things around me (if only there weren't soo many Chinese characters to learn..).

My first impressions so far are pretty great: A warm welcome, great lab & University with very nice students, awesome apartment (more like a hotel room, actually), quiet environment but still close enough to the places of interest (namely, Osaka).

I'd post some pictures, but I must have left my camera cable back in Germany, so that won't happen for a little longer..

So long,
Matthias