Another Long Update

New Photos.

This past weekend/week was really awesome. I'm officially a member of the @home club of Tohoku University. @home is a club that helps out foreign students (they were the ones who helped me when I first moved here), and they throw a lot of diversity and cultural activities. They also have a lot of parties and fun events. It's pretty amazing that even with all the diversity activities that they do, there are only 4 non-Japanese students in the club: A japanese-canadian, a doctor from Nicaragua, Fred, and I. After meeting a whole mess of people at the club meeting on Sat., I went out for lunch with my new friends. The restaurant we went to looked like denny's, but every table had their own personal tv display. After about 10 minutes of being bombarded with ads, we shut the stupid thing off.

The real fun of the weekend started later that day, at around 6.30pm, with Kuni-san's (also a member of @home) 24th birthday party. We all met at the Disney Store in downtown Sendai, and walked to a really nice restaurant on the 4th floor of some building. Fred and I almost choked when we found out that dinner was $30 a head, but we eventually coughed up the money. Apparently we were at a "Nomi-hodai", which means all you can drink for 100 minutes. After finding that out, $30 seemed quite reasonable, since it also included a lot of tasty dishes and dessert. I especially liked the jambalaya, and the 7 glasses of freshly squeezed juices. (Lychee, Orange, Pineapple, Apple, more Lychee and Orange) I think that I got my money's worth even though I don't drink.

Japanese people drink a lot. Almost as much or more than SB frat guys. And they can hold their liquor....for a while. After Kuni-san opened his gifts and everyone had their fill of liquor/socializing, we all left the restaurant to go to "niji-kai." In english, this means "second party." So everyone walked (everyone could still walk quite well) to another bar/restaurant. Fred and I both got ice cream, while my new pal Dobashi-san (who happened to start speaking English fluently after drinking) ordered about 7 glasses of whiskey. For a grad student who works on superconductors, he sure drinks a lot. Needless to say, it was a lot of fun because there were plenty of people there who didn't drink. Even the drunk ones were entertaining. I also made friends with two guys from the Phillipines, and a girl from Mongolia who also live in the same dorm. After leaving the bar, Kuni-san and a couple of his friends headed off to karaoke for "sanji-kai" (third party). Fred and I figured it was time to head home, so we walked back to the kaikan with the other three from our dorm.

Sunday was a welcome party thrown by the Mori group, which involved singing "If you're happy and you know it clap your hands" in each person's native language. Met some guys from Colombia, Bangladesh (just for you Sabrina), Myanmar, Russia, Sweden, Zambia, and Cote d' Voire. After, Fred and I went to "Hard Off", a cheap electronics/junk store to find a cable modem. They had cds, gaming systems (even a Sega Saturn or two), musical instruments, motherboards, bins full of old RAM, but no cable modem. We also tried Yodabashi Camera, but no such luck as the cheapest one was 160 bucks. I did end up getting a nifty japanese-english electronic dictionary.

This was also the first week of classes. I'd have to say the highlight of my classes was in my Fundamentals of Computer Engineering class. Both JYPE students (me) and normal japanese students take the class, and the teacher is the famous Tadao Nakamura. Famous for what? Famous for inventing pipelining in computers back in the day, a concept so essential to modern computing that he was presented an award of over $100 million dollars, which he eventually declined. He also teaches at Stanford, and lives on Grant Rd. near El Camino Hospital. We had an interesting talk when he found out that I'm from Cupertino. The rest of the day was spent downtown, talking/hanging out with friends.

Next couple of days were spent campaigning for @home to attract new members. This is the first semester of school, so there is a big push to get first year students to join various clubs. Clubs, being an essential part of life. One person puts it as "Japanese are defined by what club(s) they are in". I also tried taking a normal Japanese class and failed horribly when I could barely understand what the professor was talking about. I think I'm going to drop that and take kanji instead, so I can learn to read better. The last big thing that happened was that Fred and I got lost in Sendai, and ended up at an abandoned factory a la "The Ring" or some other scary movie. After much guessing, we finally ended back on a main road. We stumbled into a yakitori shop (grilled chicken), and proceeded to feast. We couldn't really read the menu because it was written in chicken-scratch (ha ha ha), so we told the owner that anything will do. It was all chicken after all. Dinner was pretty delicious until we found out that we had just eaten several different non-standard parts of a chicken, including chicken heart. I'm not dead yet, so nothing to worry about, right?

One word more about my lab and I'll be done. I have to implement a monte carlo ray-tracer on clusters of GPUs and make the algorithm work on a parallel network of PCs. If you didn't understand that, I can sympathize because I have no clue as well. Hopefully I'll have a better idea of what the heck I'm doing in a week. The coolest thing about my lab is that I get to work on Dual nVidia 6800GT SLi systems, costing around $4000 each. That basically means that I have the best gaming machine that money can buy, all for *cough* ehem...research purposes...

Neal - All the cell phones are CDMA, and aren't compatible with US networks...I think. Not 100% sure about that.

Upcoming Agenda: Welcome party for Lab, Hana-mi parties....la la la la.....I love Japan...