Patrick: Recovering from the festivities with more festivals..

I've been hit by a spout of writer's block these days and so this post has taken second priority to a lot things, like Harry Potter for instance..

In any case, last week, my co-workers invited me to play soccer for the Bioinformatics Center team. I haven't played soccer since the 4th grade but they ensured me that it would be fine since, unlike most of the other guys in the lab, I actually play sports. It was actually not fine. Japanese people are quite enthusiastic when it comes to soccer and those pick-up games were intense. I was so embarrassed with my horrid trapping skills and easy-to-read and slow-as-hell dribbling. Yet, it was fun, even though we lost all our games.. We ended up forfeiting the last one because our goalie had fearlessly received the ball in the face and his glasses scattered into pieces.

07182007

This is a little random, but check out my first self-made meal.. all right so I bought the sashimi at the supermarket but I made the noodles myself!

07192007

On Saturday, I played badminton as usual at Doshisha. The session was extended to 1 pm now that summer's approaching. A lot of people didn't show presumably studying hard for their final exams. Apparently the entire grade for college classes here is determined by the score on these end-of-the-year exams and Kawabata-san said the failure rate is around 60%. Anyways, most of the better players still came so the games were just as exhilarating. It was extremely hot and humid though. By the end of the session I was sweating from every pore on me. My shorts and shirt were completely soaked and I was feeling utterly ikky and disgusting.

After that, I rushed home to take a shower and then headed to Hikone in Shiga Prefecture with Kawabata-san. He lives there (about an hour and a half commute) and he offered to show me around Hikone Castle and Lake Biwa (the largest lake in Japan). Unlike Kumamoto Castle which we went to during Golden Week, Hikone Castle is not a reconstruction. It's one of the few that predate Ieyasu's ban on castle construction during the Edo period. Although according to the WikiTravel site, Kumamoto Castle is one of Japan's Top3 castles (the other two being Himeji and Matsumoto which I definitely still need to see). Hikone was nice though. The weather was nice, the castle itself is pretty typical of Japanese castles, but the view of Lake Biwa was gorgeous. I'll let the pictures say the rest...

07212007

The next day, I went to the bookstore (Junkudou) near Megan's apartment to read the newly published Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Along the way, I saw people fishing on the Kamo River and photographers with their fancy and distinctive white Canon lenses. I wonder what kind of fish swim in that shallow canal they call a river... hope they're tasty.

Nick, Raunaq, and Megan came to interrupt me for lunch around noon. We had some delicious fried pork at Katsukura and then proceeded to walk off the immensely satisfying meal with a stroll along the temple district at Higashiyama. We stopped by Raunaq's favorite shrine, Yasaka Jinja, where we ended up not praying because no one had a 5 yen coin. Apparently the Japanese pronunciation, go-en, is a pun that supposedly helps make your wish come true. Raunaq said this place was great for enjoying Sakura blossoms with sake during the spring. In any case, we convinced Megan to hike with us some more and we got all the way south to Kiyomizu-dera before we decided to turn back. Along the way, we stopped by a woodblock print shop that sold a famous set of 50 odd paintings of scenes along the tokkaido road connecting Tokyo to Kyoto.
If they weren't so expensive, I would definitely buy them for decorations or presents. But I guess they're for hardcore collectors; each one had over a hundred years of history...

Upon turning back, we went to see the great Sanmon of Chion Temple which is one of the three largest Divine Gates in Japan. The one we went up during our first week in Kyoto at Nanzenji was pretty big already but still much smaller than Chion Temple's gate. After that, exhausted from the humidity more than anything else, we decided to head back to Gion and try our luck at the famous matcha dessert cafe Tsujiri. We were able to enter the cafe after waiting in line for 40 minutes or so. They were nice enough to hand out iced towels and paper fans. The desserts were without question deliciously pleasing. Check them out in the pictures. After that, Megan, Raunaq, and Nick went off to watch some Office and I went back in search of a bookstore to read some more Harry Potter...

07222007

On Wednesday, Megan and I went to Osaka where we met Raunaq, Keeley, and Obina to attend the Tenjin Festival (天神祭), another one of Japan's Top3 festivals. The festival is held every year on 7/24 and 7/25. Unfortunately these dates are weekdays which meant we couldn't attend the festivities due to work. But on 7/25 we decided to go in the evening to see the end of the festival and the fireworks.

Unlike the Gion festival in Kyoto, this one featured portable shrines being moved on floating barges on the Yodogawa River. Yaten (屋店), food stalls, lined the river banks and the number of people in attendance was mind-blogging. There were definitely more people at the Tenjin Matsuri than those who went to Gion. This made things difficult when the fireworks started to go off. The crowds of people rushed to and fro to catch a glimpse of the fireworks. Unfortunately they were launched from the same side of the river as the food stalls so we caught great glances of fireworks... behind trees or buildings. Unfortunately, there is no height restriction on buildings in Osaka (unlike in Kyoto) so it was impossible to get any clear view of the night sky from where we were. And the people were so dumbfounded by the fireworks (as if they haven't seen any before) that they would stand content behind these trees and buildings to hear the explosions while oohing and gushing at the flashing night sky. Thus all the roads and alleys to the river ended up being clogged by human plaque and we soon lost Keeley and Obina somewhere in the crowd. Raunaq, Megan, and I valiantly fought our way, squeezing through the mass of people, old and young, trying to get to an open clearing to better see the fireworks. There were moments when I would lose hope and allow myself to drown in sea of hands, hair, feet, and tunneling children thinking this must be what my food feels like brushed by the tiny microvilli in the intestines. I don't mind being squashed in the middle of groups of girls wearing yukatas with hair smelling of white lilies but I definitely don't care for the skinny Japanese guys stinking of BO. With significant effort, we finally made our way onto a large bridge where people gathered to enjoy the fireworks on both sides and see the floating barges pass by underneath. I think the best place to enjoy the festival would definitely be on one of those barges. I wonder when and where you could actually get on one... The bridge, nonetheless, gave us a great view of the fireworks until a foreigner who must've been at least 7 ft tall came by and obscured the skies. Megan tried to get a picture with him without him realizing but we were met with much difficulty. We even met some other Japanese guys trying to do the same thing. Check out the pictures to see Megan's antics. All in all, it was a great festival, awesome atmosphere, the fireworks were pretty standard (if not a little disappointing), great food, the crowd was an experience in itself, and best of all, we've hit up 2 of the top3 festivals in Japan! Only one more to go.. though I think we're gone before it's celebrated.

07252007

Patrick: Typhoon and festival hit Kyoto

Ok, let's see.. it was quite a weekend this time and I've got a lot of ground to cover. Things began on Thursday night when Rio came back to Kyoto for dinner and a movie. I heard from Yoshiko that there was a restaurant at the top of Takashimaya that was famous for its hamburgers. So Megan, Rio, and I went and indeed those hamburgers were bunless and delicious. Although for the price, I would much rather have those wonderfully thick burgers in Sausalito that are every bit as juicy and satisfying. In any case, Michael would be happy to know that this restaurant that we went to had an all-you-can-eat bread set option.

07122007

The next day, Jean came back to Kyoto and I met her and her friend, Lindsay, for dinner after they finished the fourth installment of Die Hard. Lindsay is currently working on her doctoral degree at Stanford which came to me as a huge surprise because she appeared way younger than I would have expected. In fact she looked around Jean's age if not younger (must be the Hawaiian sun). Apparently she took Japanese with Jean, Brian, Jason, Stephanie, Jeff, Nick, etc. back at Stanford. Dinner was originally going to be a well-known ramen restaurant somewhere in Daimaru but I failed to lead us there (probably didn't listen to the directions carefully enough, sigh, I know...). Over dinner, we got to talking about the funny little idiosyncrasies belonging to people in their Japanese class. Good thing I took second-year Japanese the year before. Although I must say, class seems like it would have been a whole lot more interesting with them.

07132007

On Saturday, Jean and I went sight-seeing in Kobe. She had never been and I still harbored this dream to see the highly acclaimed Kobe night scape. Our first stop was Nunobiki Falls (布引の滝) a little north of Shin-Kobe station. The rain was unfortunate but I guess inevitable during typhoon season. After a steep climb, we got to an observation platform that overlooked the city. I bet the place would have been beautiful at night. We then continued on to the waterfalls almost getting lost on a trail that led to nowhere we wanted to be. The waterfalls themselves were fascinating. The recent downpour amplified the power and ferocity with which the torrents fell into muddy ponds from which the water continued into rivers flowing down the mountain. It was actually a series of waterfalls, each with its own name. The closeness with which we got to see them and the absence of other tourists (thank you typhoon) allowed for a rather peaceful and rewarding experience.

After the hike, we took the train back to Sannomiya station and had omu-rice, one of my favorite menu items in Japanese cuisine. This was the same store that specialized in omu-rice introduced to me by Shoko and Mariko the last time I was here. Following lunch, I took Jean on a requisite tour of Kobe's shopping arcade that dropped us off in Motomachi where the touristy nanking-town is located. We continued from there to Merikan Park and circled around Kobe's Port Tower to the Mosaic shopping center on the other side. This area, known as Harborland, was a first for me and was where we set about killing time for the next few hours. We shopped around, saw some cute stuff in a store full of expensive Miyazaki items and figurines, stared with glazed eyes at a complex contraption moving balls up and down in a whirl of metal and colors, and sampled sauces and crackers sold by a winery that Jean had coincidentally been to in Nagano. We then enjoyed a fabulous sukiyaki dinner in a quiet restaurant facing the Kobe skyline in anticipation of nightfall. And I would say that the wait was well worth it. Kobe, in my humble opinion, looks better at night than during the day. I guess the rain and the cloudy skies unfairly paint a dismal picture of daytime Kobe in my mind but at night, the place is transformed to an amusement park of light and wonder.

07142007

The next morning, Jean and I woke up early to see the floats that had been set up in Kyoto for the prominent Gion Festival (祇園祭). There are 32 of them scattered about the city around Shijo and Karasuma-dori. I wanted to collect each of the individual stamps belonging to the floats but the number of floats and the distances by which they were separated resulted in me giving up in the face of such a daunting task. There are two main types of floats: the mountains (山) which are shorter and have trees on them and the hokos (鉾) which are taller and look like boats with a tall mast jutting skyward from their centers. Along the streets, vendors open up the machiyas (traditional Kyoto merchant shop-residence hybrid houses) for the tourists to tour while selling souvenir items. There was a break in the rain and the bright colors stood out against a cloudy sky. Souvenirs of all types were being sold, from traditional fans, to umbrellas, to yukatas, to miniature float models, etc. Stalls were also setup selling fried chicken, cooked yams, shaved ice, hot dogs, bbq meat, much like the Dontaku affair with the Dontaku prices. Nick, Raunaq, and I have reached the conclusion that the prices are elevated because all the stalls are sponsored by the yakuza stifling the spirit of free market, laissez faire capitalism.

For lunch, we met up with Deni and Megan and had ramen near Nishikikoji market. We then marched through the crowds, in the unbearably humid weather, east across the Kamo River to Gion in search of the famous maccha dessert cafe, Tsujiri. But misfortune befell when we arrived as the line that extended from the end of the block into the shop and up the stairs would set us back at least 4 hours. We ended up buying green tea soft serve (me), floats (Megan and Deni), and a cookie sandwich (Jean) and brought them back to the river to be enjoyed. I'm definitely going back for the real deal some day... when the line is shorter and I find someone willing to go with me. Needless to say, the green tea was genuinely delicious. Although thinking back to the dessert Brian and I had in Uji, this stuff was remarkably similar in quality and taste.

Afterwards, we accompanied Megan and Deni to Teramachi where they shopped for flowers to go with their yukatas. The usually crowded shopping arcade was even more inundated by the influx of foreigners and I was glad to be out of there. Deni headed back with Megan to her apartment to change into yukatas and meet the others who were arriving from out of town. Jean and I took a stroll through the area and ended up by the river where we relaxed in the cool breeze and commented on the various yukatas we saw. Some of the yukatas were quite pretty and the color combinations dazzling to behold while others were too understated or clashed despicably. Actually Jean and I disagreed on some because she felt that the bows (obi, 帯) needed to stand out even if it meant wearing a color that couldn't be found on the yukata itself.

That day was Jean's birthday and for dinner, we had made reservations for shabu-shabu tabenomihodai at 風風亭. For the avid readers of this blog, it should be clear that this would entail a night of all-you-can-eat beef hot pot accompanied by all-you-can-drink alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. Needless to say, it was a glorious night of revelry. It was great seeing everyone again... though we dearly missed the Tokyo crew. After dinner, we took the fun down to the river where we played with some short-lasting firework wands. And so ended a totally surreal and eventful day. Happy Birthday Jean!

07152007

The next day, after sending Jean off at Kyoto station where she took the shinkansen over to Tokyo, I met up with Raunaq, Deni, Nick, and Megan to see the floats again. This time we went around and bought finger food from the stalls. That day, it was Ocean's Day (海の日) which is apparently a national holiday. Oh I forgot to mention that Tuesday is the main day of the festival with a special parade where the floats are dragged by manpower down the closed off Shijo avenue (as you will see in a moment). The previous night is known as yoiyama (宵山) with an additional yoi added for successive day prior to Tuesday. So Sunday was 宵宵山 and Saturday was 宵宵宵山. The revelry and the people also increase as the main event draws closer.

So we walked around, saw the floats, looked for food, Raunaq bought a coconut, and all in all things were the same as before. A freak rainstorm drenched us through and through and we hastily retreated back to the covered shopping arcade of Teramachi where we ate delicious crepes. Nick and Raunaq left before dinner and Megan, Deni, and I went to see what 宵山 was all about. Shijo was closed off to cars and people walked the streets resulting in a flurry of fast-moving feet, snapping cameras, flowery yukatas, and scrambling children. The floats were lit up by the glow of lanterns and emanated eerie percussion sounds and whistles. It took us a while to walk down to Karasuma on Shijo from Megan's apartment. After that, we called it a night and I sent Deni off as she made her way back to Yokohama from Kyoto station on the shinkansen.

07162007

The events of today finally bring an end this absurdly long post. This morning, I headed for Shijo and Karasuma on the subway at 9 am to see the parade. The skies graced us with a slight breeze and no rain. I waited patiently on the corner of the intersection for the big hoko to move past which took a while since it had to wait for clearance in the front and also obey the traffic lights. Fortunately most of the young people were at school so all that was left were foreigners and old people. Thus the people in front of me were for the most part incredibly short, making it easier for me to take pictures. Every once in a while, an annoying foreigner would get in the way but I would always be able to move to a better location.

The floats were definitely more exciting in motion. They seemed rather easy to pull too because the people pulling them didn't appear to strain much. It took me an hour to walk down to the river to get on the Keihan. Along the way, I became a little jealous of all the people strutting expensive DSLRs. Overall, the festival was definitely much more exciting than any that I have experienced in Japan so far, especially the parade during the Aoi Matsuri. The giant floats, the throngs of people, the eerie flute music, the flowery yukatas, and the delicious finger foods all culminated in a spectacular event that really shouldn't be missed.

07172007

Patrick: Newfound freedom

In order to avoid taking the spotlight entirely away from Brian's rare and enlightening post, I will keep mine brief. Here I have some pictures of a trip to Osaka that I took with Hiroki and Mariko from our architecture class. We checked out the Umeda Skybuilding that Brian introduced in class, shopped around at Shinsaibashi, and ate okonomiyaki at Dotonbori. Thanks to Brian's presentation, we were able to better appreciate the Umeda Skybuilding and the various details involving the reflection and transmittance of light used by Hara in the building's design. Shinsaibashi is an immensely popular shopping district with a covered arcade that extended as far as the eye could see and packed to the brim with people out for the summer sales. We took a picture with the famous Glico man and had delicious Teppan ice. We ended the day with okonomiyaki at Dotonbori, a bladerunner-esque shopping district lit up by neon signs of all colors and sizes.

07082007

On Monday, I started my first day at Kyoto University. The supervising professor was really busy though so I didn't get a chance to meet him. My colleagues (all graduate students) are all very considerate and helped me find a workstation to customize for my use. I gave the system (3.6 Ghz Xeon 64-bit with 2GB of ram) a clean install of Ubuntu Linux 7.04 but ran into some trouble with unsupported printer driver and necessary plug-ins. It turns out, they don't actually have a project prepared, forcing me to find a topic on my own. I know it's a freedom that I should relish but I also feel too inexperienced to thoroughly formalize a reasonable research topic on my own. Still, based on my past research experience time has a tendency to fly and I should get to work as soon as possible or else I won't have any substantial results by the end of my stay in Japan. As for the school... the Uji campus is much less claustrophobic than the narrow streets at the main Yoshida campus. The buildings are gray and rather depressing compared to the sandstone buildings at Stanford. The Bioinformatics Center that I am working at is actually quite new and the design quite attractive if not for the fact that it sits next to a rather disheveled and aging structure...

07092007

Brian: I'm Back

Hi guys, it's been a long time since you last heard from me. Patrick's been covering for us while we were at SCTI but now that we're separated, we all have to record our individual adventures and travels. I moved to Tokyo on Saturday 7/7/07 to a one-room mansion in Hongo. I will post some pictures of it later, but it is what you'd expect from a room in Tokyo, small and spare but functional. The first night, Jason stayed over because he went to a concert in Tokyo (with Linkin Park and Rihanna among others) . I fit him in the one-person sized space on the floor next to my bed. The following night, Michael stayed over because he had just come back from his brother's wedding in Irvine and I did the same thing for him. It worked out well because I could provide him accommodations and he could tie my tie for me the next day :).

My internship is at a robotics group in Tokyo University. My professor is Arai Tamio (last name Arai) and his group is split up between him and 2 associate professors, Yokoi and Ota. I am in Arai's group working in the Robocup project, but unfortunately not directly on the AIBO robots who play soccer for Robocup. I'm currently assigned to the overhead fisheye camera that monitors the field. It's a new camera and the only existing code that has been written simply grabs a frame and stores it. He wants me to use the camera to localize objects on the field in 2D, which sounds relatively straightforward. However, calibrating the distortion caused by the fisheye camera remains a challenge. I'm currently on my 4th day here, where the first day consisted mainly of introductions and a meeting, the 2nd day was software installation and getting familiar with the subject, and the 3rd day was a group meeting and leaving early to meet up with friends. So, I haven't done any real work yet. Contrary to what I believed coming in here, there really aren't high expectations for me despite the fact that I'm the first undergraduate intern and the faculty literally had to change the system to let me in (Arai sensei keeps telling me how surprised he is that they would allow it). He just wants me to be a "powerful support" to my colleagues, so any real work that I do will just be a nice bonus. As for the other people here... they do seem pretty hard working in general. I was really impressed on the first day because they stayed until 12 midnight, but as I realized the following day, it is because they don't get in the office until 12 noon. So, depending on whether I want my job to sound easy or hard, I can say I don't leave until midnight, or alternatively that I don't get in until noon.

Yesterday I met up with my quintet from freshman year. As luck would have it, 4 of the 5 of us are in Tokyo at the moment. Besides me, Guson (piano) is on vacation before he starts med school, Naoya (cello, just admitted to Juilliard) is doing a consulting internship at Bain, and Iris (violin, UCSD med school) is playing in a music festival in Japan. I first met up with Naoya and Guson in Shinjuku and we did some window shopping and chatted before eating a really lame dinner. It sounded good, beef tongue set, but the set was really lame, just 3 pieces of beef tongue, a bowl of rice, some pickled cabbage that tasted disgusting, and a bowl of soup. The tongue was really tough - in fact the only redeeming quality was the soup was good. And it wasn't cheap either, it was Y1450. Afterwards we met up with Iris at about 10:00 because her concert ended at 9:30. We talked for a bit in a cafe and then ate some Hokkaido ramen. Iris kept reverting back to Japanese because she didn't speak anything but Japanese until she was 5 years old. Naoya is also fluent at Japanese despite being Japanese-American. We had a nice time catching up but in the end, we stayed too late. We didn't leave the ramen place until 12, and though everybody else got back OK, I was stranded on a train 2 stops from Shibuya and had to take a taxi back home. It ended up being Y3620 to get back, which I justified as 1) you have to do it at least once to know how much it hurts and 2) it's cheaper than a capsule hotel and I wouldn't have to worry about getting back to Tokyo University the next day.

Patrick: Wrapping things up

So it's finally over. The SCTI quarter has officially come to a close. Final papers, presentations, exams have been done away with and the closing ceremonies have concluded. For the rest of the summer, we're on our own spread out across Japan. The independence is a little daunting, I must admit. Here are a few memories of the last week of SCTI:

Below is a gallery of other people's design cubes for the architecture class. We all spent a lot of time on the models, more time than was actually required it seems. I really liked how everyone had such unique ideas and concepts for their ideal living space. And in the end, the efforts put into realizing those ideas really came through , making the individual presentations all the more interesting.

Other dCubes

We each took turns explaining our motivations for the design cubes. Each person's presentation was around 10 minutes with an extra 5 to 10 min critique from the architects. The critiques would often run off on tangents and extend into the next person's time. As a result, we ran a little over time.

07032007

Here's what my apartment looks like from shichi-jo 七条. I'm on the 5th story facing this street. I just found out last night that the city is a little noisy at night with the random police sirens and roaring engines of street racers interrupting the otherwise standard city static.

06292007

On Thursday, Brian, Daryl, Todd, Jean, and I went to Amanohashidate 天橋立 in northern Kyoto. It is one of Japan's three most scenic locations 日本三景; the other two being Miyajima (which we went to already) and Matsushima Bay (in Sendai, north of Tokyo on the Pacific coast). It had been raining for the past week on and off so I was a little worried about the weather. Fortunately the skies held up and the sun even came out later in the afternoon. Transportation was a little expensive since the express trains cost extra hence a lot of people dropped out of the trip last minute. Jean is here on vacation so she had a 3-week long JR pass making the trip much cheaper. However, the location is definitely worth going to and coupled with the great company, I think we came away with an invaluable experience in the end.

As for what we did there... when we arrived, we walked across the isthmus that connected the lips of the bay. It was a 3.2 km walk in a park of pine trees on one side and a stretch of beautiful beach on the other side. I think this was my first time on a beach in Japan. Since it was a weekday, there were very few people there making for some great landscape pictures. Once we crossed to the other side, we decided to hike up the mountain to the vista point up top instead of taking the lift. I think we ended up regretting the choice a little since it was a humid day and the stairs were really really steep. By the end of the 30 minute climb, I was sweating through and through; absolutely drenched from head to toe.

The view on the top was definitely worth it though. The place is known as Amanohashidate, literally a "bridge in the sky" because when you look at it upside-down through your legs, you should see the waters reflect the sky making the sky and water indiscernible. Hence the isthmus sitting in between looks like it is rising into or from the sky. The reflections were not quite that clear but it does look quite amazing upside-down (through Brian's legs). From the side we were on, the sand bar wasn't visible. I've seen postcards, probably taken from the other side, where the sand bar looks like the spines on a rising dragon giving rise to the other nickname the place has which I haven't figured out how to read in Japanese but includes the kanji 飛龍.

From the vista point, we hiked another 40 minutes up to a temple further in the mountains (the bus was really expensive... 1100 yen for two-ways). The temple was nothing too special compared to some of the other temples we've seen back in more central Kyoto. But there was another observation deck which provided another stunning view of the place. Another 1 km up was supposedly the No.1 vista point in Japan. We were too tired to confirm the claim, but I must admit it is great marketing. Who can easily pass up the No.1 of anything?

On the way back, we found out the restaurants were still making preparations for dinner and closed for business. So we headed back to Kyoto and had ramen at one of the Kansai area's most famed ramen-ya. I think I liked the one in Ichijoji better though... The place was called 新福菜館 and located about 5 minutes from my current apartment. Next door is another famous ramen-ya but it was closed on Thursdays. I'll most certainly make my way back to try it out some time next week...

07052007

The SCTI farewell party was held from 6 to 8:30 pm on Friday at the Royal Hotel on kawaramachi. It was quite a fancy occasion attended by our professors, our host families, president of Doshisha University, and other prominent figures involved in making the SCTI program possible. The hotel was also pretty classy and the food was delicious. My only qualms are that the timing was too punctual, too perfect. We ended at exactly 8:30. I didn't even have time to eat dessert...

After some speeches given in a mixture of Japanese and English, we had an excellent taiko performance by Rio and Deni. The host families were absolutely stunned how well foreigners were able to perform such a traditional Japanese art form. Following that Jason and MickeyD rapped in English and Japanese recounting some great moments that occurred during this past quarter. Then came the slideshow that Emily prepared by choosing representative pictures from all the ones we took while here in Kyoto. Looking back, we really had quite memorable experiences. The places we went to, the things we ate, the people we saw, the temples and shrines we visited, the friends we made.. I can't even begin to describe how special these memories mean to me now and I'm not even gone from Japan yet. I think that has got to be the most important reason for keeping this blog. Without it, my memories would mix and mingle and things would inevitably sift down into the abyss of forgetfulness.

After the party, a few of us went to karaoke on kawaramachi. It was going to be our last event with each other in a while so we really wanted to make it a night to remember. Of course, alcohol was kept to a minimum since people had early departure times the next day to their internship sites. I think Jason deserves the credit in really substantiating what it means to karaoke with our crowd. We have developed (unconsciously or consciously I don't know) this tradition of ending on Bon Jovi hollering the lyrics at the top of our lungs in a circle connected by arms and shoulders. The camaraderie is... absolutely fabulous.

07062007

The next morning, I woke up early to attend an exhibition match between Doshisha and rival Ritsumeikan. The location was a sports facility near Kyoto station. It was quite a big complex and almost looked like a hotel. There were 6 courts in all. I only played 2 matches since I had to leave early to finish packing and prepare for my move, but again I was surprised by the organization and the dedication the players displayed for the match. The Doshisha players were better as a whole but the good players of the other school were indeed very good.

After that, I went home, packed my things, had lunch, and then my host family brought me and my luggage to the apartment. Overall, I couldn't have asked for a better residence. The location is absolutely perfect, being close to Kyoto station where I can take the JR and kintetsu lines as well as to the Kamo River where I can board the keihan. Convenient stores and restaurants are also abundant in the area. The room is much bigger than a Stanford dorm room, with a living room the size of 10 tatamis. It comes furnished with kitchen utensils, a closet, mirrors, a fridge, microwave, rice cooker, water heater, a/c (that's really really important given the imminent heat wave), a tv with a DVD player, and a laundry machine. Overall, it is quite comfortable and all my utilities are paid for so all I have left to worry about is to not lock myself out because there's no friendly RA right down the hall to go to for emergencies...

07072007

I've updated my panoramas so here's the link to the gallery again:

Panoramas

Patrick: Architecture Project

In place of a final exam, we were assigned a project for which we had to construct an 18 cm x 18 cm model house. After 6 days of construction, I'm finally done. We presented our projects to the professor and two other architects, one from Hong Kong and another German architect working in Japan. Needless to say, they were quite critical. But given that I am not an architect major I guess it's expected. Here's what my cube looked like from start to finish:

My dCube