Long Update

Sorry I missed updating, I've been a little busy. On Friday Nobu and I went to see the park and the national science museum in Ueno. The park was hosting a flowering bonsai competition, which was really beautiful. They had somewhere between 75 and 100 bonsais, lined up along the main street in the park.

The national science museum had a really wide range of stuff, ranging from natural history to more modern science exhibits. Nobu was really bored by the natural history, it was stuff that he'd already seen a lot of, but I thought some of it was interesting. The early Japanese history, on the cavemen, and the evolution of early civilization in Japan was cool. I'd never seen much on that. It was really similar to early American history, or history anywhere for that matter, but it was still interesting to see the minor differences.

The modern science parts of the museum we really good. The first part we visited was targeted more towards children, but it was really good anyway. They had a bunch of cool physics demos; a really powerful electromagnet, Thompson's ring, that demo with the bicycle wheel and the stool, some neat static electricity demos, a pulley setup.

The next room was on mechanical innovation, and had a bunch of really cool mechanical setups. Nobu liked this part a lot better. They had a rotary engine, and a bunch of early clocks. I thought the coolest part were the mechanical equation solvers. The one pictured could solve a set of equations with 9 linear variables, so nine equations of the form ax1+bx2+cx3+....+hx8=ix9. Pretty amazing stuff.

The last part of the museum we visited was on modern physics. It was probably one of the best displays I've ever seen at a museum. It started out on a section explaining basic measures in physics, and demonstrating the units of measurement: meter, second, kilogram, amp, ohm, volt, mol, etc. all with hands on activities. The rest of it featured a whole bunch of really cool, important physics experiments. The included the Cavendish experiment, a demonstration of enthalpy, some demonstrations of spectral lines, a Michelson interferometer, and an experiment measuring the speed of light using a flywheel and a fiber cable (similar to the rotating mirror experiment).

The coolest part of everything was probably the cloud chamber the museum had. It used super-cooled alcohol vapor to detect ionizing particles. So, you could watch through the window, and you would see paths form in the mist whenever an electron, a proton, or a cosmic ray passed through it. I took a video, I'll upload it once I get time.

Yesterday we went to Akihabra and the Sensoji temple. Akihabra is also known as Akihabara Electric Town and is a large shopping district that sells a lot of video games, computer equipment, electronics, anime, etc. Essentially its one gigantic shopping area for nerds (otaku in Japanese). Nobu was looking for merchendise related to a fairly obscure video game he plays, so we went around to a bunch of stores looking for things. In Akihabra most of the stores have tiny storefronts, and then go up like 5 or 6 stories. Unfortunately the merchendise was usually in the upper stories, above the games and manga (comics) so we did a lot of walking. We also saw a lot of weird stuff. Like giant pillows with anime school-girls on them, mouse pads with anime school-girls on them and breast-shaped gel wrist-wrests. A lot of things with anime school-girls on them. It was a little strange at times, but a lot of fun overall. Some really awesomely geeky stuff.

After Akihabara we went to the Sensoji temple. It was raining, so we went through a little fast. It was really really crowded, and seemed like a real tourist pull. The building was really amazing, but I can't say it was particularly Japanese or even really like a temple. Like I said it was really crowded and definately a tourist trap. I'd like to try going back during the week, when it might not be so crowded.

Today Nobu and I moved again, back from Sa-chan's (Nobus's Mom's friend) house to Nobu's family's apartment. I had a lot of fun staying with Sa-chan and her husband, and I'm really glad I got the opportunity to meet them. I have 3 more days before the program starts. Hopefully we'll find some more cool stuff.

Delicious Food

We didn't do much yesterday because it was raining. We stayed inside and hung out, I studied a little bit. We went out for dinner though, and I remembered to take pictures of the food this time (I know a couple people asked). Nobu, his Mom and I went out to a place that specialized in shiyoiyaki. Shiyoiyaki is chicken where the main seasoning is a salt. They served the chicken a few pieces at a time on skewers. It ranged from fairly "normal" parts, wings and thighs (picture right), to more exotic stuff, like knee joints. The knee joints were really weird. They were like the crun chewy part that you don't normally eat because its weird. It waschyn't bad, it was just a really odd texture. We also had a salad, and shredded radish with some mushroom thing and leeks. It was also tasty.

After dinner we changed houses. We left the guest room in Nobu's parents building, and took a train, 40 minutes farther into Tokyo to stay with Nobu's Mom's friend, "Sa-chan". She met us at the train station and got us back to her house. The house has a guest room, with futons (the Japanese kind) and internet (yay!). We hung out and talked for a bit, I got to use a lot of Japanese. She thought it was really strange that Americans call beds that fold out of couches futons. Today we're going to look around, since we're farther into the center of Tokyo.

Here are some more pictures of dinner. From top to bottom: "sand gut" chicken (Nobu wasn't sure exactly what this was (edit: apparently it's stomach?)), chicken hearts, chicken thighs, and finally the knee joint pieces. Yum.




The house we're staying at now.

Showa Memorial Park

This update may be a little shorter. I'm tired, and I'd really like to go to sleep.

Today we went to the Showa Memorial Park in Tachikawa. Getting in to the park was a little strange. Everything just transition, fairly abruptly, from a fairly busy city area straight into a park. We rented bikes to see the whole thing. The track we took covered about 14km in total.

The beginning of the track looped around a bunch of stuff for kids. Playgrounds, picnic areas, etc. We did stop at a couple of these and look around. One of them was a supposed to be like clouds. It was a giant white rubber think that you could bounce on. It was too cool to pass up.

We spent a lot of the time at the Japanese gardens. These covered a large portion of the park and included a lake, some traditional style buildings, and a bonsai collection. The weather was good, and it was awesome to get outside for a while.




The park.

First!

So this is the first post in my new blog. Cool. Over the summer I hope to use this in order to document my trip to Japan for everyone that wants to read about it. I'm sure there are a lot of you.

Anyway, right now I've been in Japan for a little over a day. I arrived on the plane yesterday at Narita, before taking a bus to Nobu's home in Musashi-Sakai. The flight was long and boring (12 hours) and customs was a pain. It was wonderful to finally make it out of the airport. It's been mid to high 70s here, and sunny. A lot better than Chicago.

After we got to Nobu's house yesterday we moved into the guest room. It's essentially a hotel room: two beds and a bathroom. We ate dinner and then went shopping, I found out I'd forgotten my deodorant (whoops). I passed out on the bed in the guest room after I sat down to see whether or not we had internet.

Today I woke up around 10. I set up Skype (IM or email me for my contact info) so that I could talk to my parents. We ate lunch at a ramen place near nobu's apartment. We had ramen with leeks and egg. It was really good. After that we went out shopping again. I needed a charger for my camera (I forgot a couple things) and body soap. The electronics store was pretty cool. Everything was really expensive though, that was not so cool. I guess this is one of the places that I really notice the difference in cost of living. Software is $80 instead of $50. Everything was generally about 60% more. Although interestingly LAN cables we cheaper. US they tend to average about $1 per cable, they were ~150 yen/meter here. This works out to roughly $.44 per foot. They also sold only flat cat 5/6, which was pretty cool. It was only a couple millimeters thick, with the cables put into a ribbon rather than would into a circle. There's a picture of the shopping street to the left. It was really wierd, like a mall smack dab in the middle of the city. Also interesting, most shops had tiny storefronts, but then went up like 3 or 4 stories.

Overall, everything was really nice. I'm going to bed now, I already dozed off in the middle of this. I need to stop going to sleep by accident.

More Pictures, Nobu and I at the train station.

Nobu's house.