Hirasuna Festival

My Kanji test was OK. I only made three minor mistakes so I was satisfied with my overall performance. But on Friday, we were given the schedule for next week and we found out that we have a MAJOR test coming up next week.

Well, thanks to the rain, our plan to go to Ushiku was again postponed, the 4th time in as many weeks.

After the test, on Friday night (May 23rd), I went to the Hirasuna Festival . If I haven`t mentioned it before, Hirasuna is one of the other dorms here at the University. My dorm is Ichinoya and the two are at the opposite ends of the University Campus. In comparison to Ichinoya, Hirasuna is much, MUCH more lively than Ichinoya; I suppose this is because its closer to the city center.

Anyway, the festival is one of the two festivals held at the University, the other one being the University Festival which is held sometime in October. Organised by students, there are performances ranging from dancing and singing to talent shows, and of course food. I had no idea that the festival would be organised on such a big scale so I hadn`t taken my camera, unfortunately. The festival reminded me of the carnivals and festivals back home.

We hung around for around two hours watching some talent shows, during which met up with Jurate`s friend Kristina and I also met up with Ronit briefly. At around 10pm, the festival was concluded by burning a huge bamboo structure, which Ronit told me represented a Kanji character. We then met Kristina`s friend, Adrian from Mexico and headed off to a Mexican restaurant, El Torito, for dinner. This was to be my first Mexican food.

After dinner, we met up with some more of Adrian`s friends and went to this Izakaya but it was really small and crowded, so we went to Cyberex, the amusement center that we had went to the weekend before. We signed up for four hours there, playing pool and table tennis and when we finished, it was 4am and dawn had already started to break! We then rode back to the University and parted with ohayo gozaimasu (good morning). It was about 4.10am when I reached my dorm room. I had signed up for a free bus trip that was organized by the International Student Center and Joyo bank and was supposed to convene at the Int. Student Center at 7.10am but I decided against going.

I woke up late the next day, lazed around, dozed off again and woke up again and soon found out it was 6pm! I had got bored with staying in my dorm room all day long so I again went to the Hirasuna Festival with a friend, Tito from Bolivia, who`s also in the same Japanese language class as I am. But this time, it wasn`t so much fun as it was raining. There were no food stalls. The only highlight was a beauty contest in which all the contestants were wearing Kimonos. After watching the crowning, we were about to return but saw that the finale of the festival was yet to be...a fireworks display....yes, thats right..a fireworks display in the rain!...it was quite impressive. An entire carpark was cordoned off and fireworks were launched from there. Back home, we didn`t have such big fireworks even for Diwali! I managed to get some pics on my cell phone. At times, the carpark looked like a small war zone with so much fumes. By this time, it was raining heavily and Tito and I went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant nearby. We were thoroughly soaked when we returned back to our dorm.

We have again rescheduled our plan to go to Ushiku next Saturday. But that's going to be a little problematic as I also have a robot contest in my lab the same day. Lets see if I can juggle both events together.

Watashi no Kuni (My Country)

We gave a presentation today about our countries in the Japanese language. I wasn`t looking too forward to this as having studied the Japanese language for only about 6 weeks now, a presentation was not something I felt I was ready for.

First I had problems writing my essay. Luckily a Japanese friend, Haruka-san, was kind enough to translate my essay into Japanese for me and had it not been for her, I wouldn`t have been able to finish it.

I was then unlucky enough to be the first presenter and when I stood up in front, I forgot some of the lines I had memorized. (We were told that we had to memorize our essays and that we wouldn`t be allowed to read. I found this very unreasonable).

So, I`m not feeling too pleased with myself today as I think my presentation wasn`t so good. I have a Kanji test this Friday and I think I should make it up by studying for it.

I`ve been to Ushiku Daibutsu too....not!

Yesterday, we were supposed to go to Ushiku to see Daibutsu, the world`s largest statue of Bhudda.　I had bought my Sony Handycam Camcorder specially for this trip and fifteen of us turned up at Tsukuba Station but to our dismay, Naoki had an outdated bus schedule with him and we found out that only bus bound for Ushiku had already left!

Disappointed, the group split and some of us went to Tsukuba Botanical Garden to kill some time. We hung around for around an hour before returing back to our dorms.

At 7pm we met again, this time it was only Jurate, Naoki and Sato and me; we first went for dinner at a Chinese restaurant near Hirasuna and later, we went to Karaoke and spent two hours there.

From there, we went to Cyberex, an amusement center in Tsukuba and played pool and table tennis. Jurate teamed up with Naoki against Kristina and I and although they defeated us in the first two rounds, we were victorious in the 5th game. We then played table tennis till 1.30am and then returned.

We`ll go to Ushiku Daibutsu next Saturday....hopefully.

If you`re buying a cell phone in Japan...

I received my first bill for my cell phone this week. How much? 7,200 Yen!

So if you`re thinking about having a cell phone in Japan, it`ll pay to think twice (or thrice!) about which phone company you want to subcribe to. I got myself an AU deal at the advice of my tutor but most students in Japan use Softbank. When buying, I couldn`t get the answers to all my questions, thanks to the language barrier, so I had no choice but just to buy one and so when I received my first bill, it was a real shocker. I then took Ronit (thanks bro!) and went over my phone plan once again and downgraded some of the features that I had initally subscribed to.

Today, I bought the latest Sony Handycam currently available on the market from Ishimaru in Tsukuba and I`m feeling very pleased with myself as I bought the handycam completely alone using the Japanese that I have learnt over the last 5 or so weeks. Costing me $125,000Y, the HDR-SR12 Sony Handycam Camcorder has a 120GB hard drive, is High Defintion (HD) with 1920x1080 recording, with Face Detection technology and ClearVid CMOS sensor...impressive desu ne?

Roboken Open Lab, Tsukuba Festival and Roboken BBQ

The Intelligent Robot Laboratory (Roboken) and some other labs from the Department of Intelligent Interaction Technologies held their Open Lab day on Saturday 10th May, coinciding with Tsukuba Festival.

There were two robots in particular that intertested me...one was from my lab. It was a small differentially driven robot with a laser range finder that detected a human in front of it and followed it autonomously...if one walks away from the robot, it commences it`s human-following behaviour and if the person walks towards it, the robot backs up...although its electronics and behavior was elementary, the robot looked quite cool executing this human tracking behaviour. It was also robust enough to follow just a single person most of the time even if a second person came in its way.However, the response time of the laser range finder was 0.1seconds so if one steps away from the robots quicky, it loses track of the human. Here are some pics and vids.

Later I went to the festival at Tsukuba Center, with Ronit, where there were food stalls from various countries. I had a chicken kebab from an Iranian stall. Unfortunately, it rained all day long so we couldn`t stay there for long.

The next day, Sunday 11th May, Roboken lab held its annual BBQ. It has become somewhat of a tradition of Roboken to have its BBQ annually, around end of spring time. This year the plan was to go to Hitachi but due to the rain, we went to Yukarinomori instead. This is quite near the University. Yuta sensei explained to me that he had observed that students worked indoors most of the time, in a closed environment and so he initiated the idea to take the entire lab members on excursions, for a break away from the lab. The Roboken members had also gone for a 6 hour hike to some mountain during the Golden Week but I had gone to Tokyo the same day.

The BBQ event was quite fun as after lunch, we (boys and girls) played soccer on a muddy field and got ourseleves thourougly dirty.

And the Whole World Shook...

The talk of the day today was the series of earthquakes that struck us in the early hours of the morning today.

It was around 2am when I first felt small jolts. Having already experienced some earthquakes in my first 3 weeks, I ignored it and concentrated on trying to sleep when a slighly larger one caught my attention. Even then I did nothing initially as I trusted Japanese construction. But when the next quake struck and brought down some of the stuff in my shelf, it had me up in a jiffy.....outside I heard some of the other guys from my dorm who had decided to go outside. Not only was the quake strong (and I mean STRONG), its duration was also scary...it went on and on for several minutes as if someone was trying to demolish our dormitory.

Later in the day, one of my senseis told us that the earthquake measured 6.8 on the Richter scale...lets just say that as far as earthquakes are involved, one experience is enough for me.

A Day in Tokyo

Yesterday (Monday 5th May) Jurate, Naoki and I went to Tokyo....for a day that has probably been one of my most exciting days of my stay in Japan so far.

We left Tsukuba at around 10.30am and first went to Asakusa to see Sensōji (or Asakusa Kannon), the largest Buddhist temple in the Tokyo area.

Later we went to Ueno Zoo, had a look around and also lunched there. Pics are worth a thousand words so they are here. From Ueno we went to Shinjuku to enter the 45th story of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building where the South Observatory is located. From here, one gets a panoramic view of the skyscrapers of Japan. We saw this ingenious advertisement in a station and had a good laugh over it.

Shibuya was our next stop at around 6pm where we had also dinner at an Indian resaurant. Later, we walked around the streets as Jurate wantetd a glimpse of the teen fashion that Shibuya is reowned for. As it was Golden Week, there were even more people at the intersection than I had previously seen. Roppongi was our next destination and it spelt class from the moment we sat foot out of the station. Roppongi Hills, a massive daprtment store lies just in front of the station exit with a humongous replica of a spider outside. We entered Roppongi Hills just to how it`s interior looked like but found out that an admission fee applied if we were to go any further than the first floor so we came back. Just outside Roppongi Hills, we could see Tokyo tower and we decided to go there on foot. Not one of our best decisions, we spent around 40mins trying to reach Tokyo Tower. Although it looked close, we later found out that it wasn`t so simple as we had to cross through countless streets and sidealleys and at times we found ourselves in narrow, unlit streets.

On our way to Tokyo Tower, Naoki saw Tiffany and Co. and we decided to enter it, just for fun...one of the rings I saw there carried a price tag with about 7 or 8 digits (in Yen) so we quietly made our exit. Further ahead we saw three Aston Martin V8 Vantage cars in a showroom....one was exactly the same type as the one used in the movie Die Another Day......I can only dream about driving a car like that........so the next best thing we did was to pose in front of the cars and have our pics taken!

Finally about 40mins later, we reached the foot of Tokyo Tower and I　still retain that first image, of the foot of the tower, in my mind,,,,what a marvellous feat of Japanese engineering...333meters of steel standing upright, self supported....50 years old and still holding the record of being the highest self supporting structure in the world.....I had been to New Zealand`s Sky Tower before and at 186meters, I thought that was impressive until I saw Tokyo Tower.

We went to the first level which is 150m high and saw the entire of Tokyo and its surrounding areas lit up with lights. So amazing was the sight that I only took a few pics as the views were something that no cameras could ever capture. We then wanted to go to the next level which was 250m high but found out that we would have to wait for 70mins as only a few people at a time can go to the second level...because the tower gets quite thin that high up. Undecided initially because not having anywhere to stay in Tokyo,we had to catch the last train back from Akihabara at 11.30pm and it was already about 9pm. We still decided to join the queue to go up as we thought we might not come back again to see one of the finest views in Japan. Luck on our side, it took was only about 30mins and we went to the second level....not before having some fun....there was a drunk couple ahead of us and they started talking to us....things I didn`t understand......they were so drunck that at the ticket counter, the lady lost her balance and crashed on the floor!

After seeing around the second level of Tokyo Tower, we rushed to the nearest station to go back to Akihabara. It was around 12.20am when I reached my dormitory.

Second Month

OK, I now have to fast forward about three weeks in time as i can`t possibly write everything I did.

I had bought my Dell laptop about three weeks back in Shibuya but purchasing a laptop here in Japan is interesting: one gives the desired specifications and a laptop is assembled to that specification by the manufacturer and delivered to your doorstep in two weeks...thats why I couldn't update this blog last month.

Anyway, I received my laptop and its quite cool....it evens comes with a remote control!....so now I can write about what I have been upto. Very briefly, Ronit (the other student from Fiji) took me around places...we went to Akihabara, Shinjuku and Shibuya in the weekends....and yes!....on Sunday April 27th, I also went to my first Karaoke with Naoki Hase (from Japan), Cecilia Manoliu (also a new student, from Romania), and Kristina Simonaityte (also from Lithuania). (The Karaoke was great fun and I have many pics (and vids!) of it but as there are pics of me actually singing, they`re not for public consumption! Instead, they`re in my private albums and if you`d like to view them, you can email me and if I know you, I may have a change of heart!) Later, we went to this Japanese Restaurant for dinner (I forgot the name) where you have to sort of "cook" your own dish.

Yesterday marked the end of my first month in Japan (how time flies!) and now that I come to think of it, I am NOW settled, although I still am having problems with the Japanese language. Amongst the many vices I possess, one of the very few virtues I have is that of preparedness. And so, luckily I had started learning Japanese (Hiragana) by myself when I was in Fiji and that had helped a lot. I am enrolled into the Intensive Japanese Language program and as the name implies...IT IS INTENSIVE!......we have classes everyday from 8.40am to 3pm with two 15min breaks and a 45min lunch in between and by the time we finish, we`re all exhausted....not to mention the shukudai (homework) we have to complete everynight!

On Wednesday 30th April, there was a party for the participants of the Intensive Japanese Language Program, the new Monbukagakusho Scholarship students.

This (or next?) week, its "Golden Week" in Japan because Monday and Tuesday are public holidays. So, it came at a really good time as I really needed time away from the Japanese Language program. So today, I went to Tsukuba-san (Mount Tsukuba) with Jurate and Naoki. We also visited a Japanese shrine half way through to Tsukuba-san but unfortunately, the peak of Tsukuba-san was covered with fog/mist with very poor visibility and so we had to come back. Here are the some of the pics of the visit to Tsukuba-san. For dinner, we went to this Sushi bar in Tsukuba Center , a place where the dishes are served on a moving conveyor plate. See pics here.

Tomorrow, the three of us will be going to Tokyo, Roppongi and Shinjuku.