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.
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...
3 comments:
I saw the picture said "3F chemistry research department". So, did you plan to study chemistry related project in Kyoto university?
hmm not really. the bioinformatics center is just managed under the chemical engineering department at kyoto university. there is a close relationship between bio and chemistry here so they are able to focus a lot on actual molecular structures of biological molecules.
ic, thanks.
Post a Comment