Tohoku Univeristy International Festival

Today, the local student organization held an international festival on the baseball field near my dorm. Basicly the area was covered by small tents selling all kinds of foods from all around the world. They had also put up a stage for performancers, and we had the joy to watch everything from Vietnamese bamboo dance to russian folk dances and japanese noo theatre.

The noo theatre

Thai girl playing some large string instrument

The food was varying, in both taste and amount. Turkish kebeb-thing was good, while iranian fried chicken was still raw. German sausages tasted like german sausages.

The iranian 'surprise'


Hungarian folk dance

I guess the most amusing thing was to see people from all around the world to enjoy the festival together. The iranian booth was proclaiming on large poster that 'IRAN land of love and peace'.
There was also stand from Myanmar. All in all... intresting thign to witness. Next week-end is halloween and we have something intresting planned for the costume competition. We'll see how our group will do... or won't do. We might be bit too introverts to win the dress competition but... For sure, it'll be intresting.

Lab welcome party and Imoni

Welcome party

If you wonder the lack of updates lately, the reason is adamant local common cold. I've been sick and still going to work and looking for my kyuudou teacher. So, now update about past. The first day at work, we had welcome party at some semi-italian restaurant. This also included the infamous nomihoudai, or free drinking. The lab got out of the place with light casualties, they had only to carry one secretary back home because she drank too much.


From left to right, Yuka, our secretary, Sakura, post-doc researcher and Kai, our chinese mathematician.Special dessert plate for new people of the lab.


The shampagne bottles in the image, each of us, new members to the lab got our own bottles from the party, with our names on the side of the bottle.


The date on the bottle is the date of the party.

All in all, it was a good night, and a night I will surely remember for a while.

Imoni

The student group @home, whose task it is to make echange students to feel like Sendai was their home, organized an imoni party for us. Today tons of people, as it seems customaru, had gathered on the riverside to eat good food, chat with friends and enjoy the fresh air.


I also took a short video clip from the riverside area.

As you can see, it was really croweded, but the weather was nice and the food was good and plentiful, so it was ok. I also met Kashiwa-kun, a guy who knew my friend Santeri and who had been in Finalnd year ago in the party organized by the Nippoli. All in all good day, though my cold made the trip bit painful, and probably denied me the rest I could have got back at the dorm. Well, 'No pain, no gain' as they say.

Matsushima ah!

Because today is 体育の日, or Health and Sports Day, a national holiday, we thought yesterday that we could make a day trip to a famous Matsushima and then sleep long without having to worry about making it work/classes in time.

As the name implies, Matsushima is an archipelago of some 260 small islands covered in pines. Because we had been out on saturday and had a combined nomihoudai/karaoke, we got under way around 12 a clock. Uhum.. for the people who don't know, nomihoudai means that for paying certain fixed sum of money, usually around 2000-2500 yen, you can drink as much as you like in two hours or so. The price includes also some snacks as per alcohol regulations in japan.

Anyway, as we were on our way to the train station in the center of Sendai, we stumbled upon some kind of Matsuri, or festival celebrating the Health and Sports day.

Basicly the festaval was composed of many and various groups of japanese students dancing/walking down the road, according to pre-planned coreography fitted to older or newer japanese music. You can see some of the dance here.

Most of the dance groups had also flag bearer or two, carrying the flag of the group, or flag related to the organization where the group hailed from.

We watched this spectacle for a moment or two (or three) and the continued our way to the railwaystation to catch the train to Matsushima. With local train it takes about 40 minutes and 400 yens to reach Matsushima from Sendai. In Matsushima we were greeted by the smell of the sea, multitude of small shops trying to sell stuff to tourists and groups of said japanese tourists.

According to travel information and wikitravel, the best way to see the actual are is to take a ferry trip, and so we did. About 2000 yens poorer, we headed for for 50 minute trip around the bay. The ferry was jam packed with tourists, so instead of even trying to find a sitting place near the windows, we just sat on the upper aft deck and enjoyed the fresh sea air and spectacular wievs from the less comfortable location.




The famous pine covered isles above, below Jeff and Tomiya enjoying the sunshine on the aft deck.

After the boat trip we wandered around in Matsushima, visited one small museum and had a dinner. After rather uneventfull train journey back home, we were shocked to find that our bikes were not there where we had left them. We lookd for them for a while, and then, luckily found them. I didn't pay anything for my back as it's the legacy of some formef finnish exchange student, but still I would rather not lose it and then pass it to the next exchange student, as per tradition.

My home is my castle

So I've moved to Japan, Sendai, which lies pretty much here. I'm on exchange project organized by the University of Tohoku. What I'm actually doing here, or what I should actually be doing is a masters thesis.

I'm doing my thesis in Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer in Neuronal Mass Dynamics group. I don't want to go in detail about my job yet, also I haven't yet seen much of the city either, so I won't talk about it neither... at least for now.

So, as they say, 'My home is my castle' and my, quite humble, casle looks pretty much like this.

The room is simple with few cupboards, bed, table, sink and gas stove. All the closets have been nailed to the wall, so that they would not fall on the inhabitant in case of earthquake, which are said to be rather frequent here. I live in the Sendai University International House, or Tohoku Daigaku Kokusai Koryu Kaikan, which is more commonly called just 'kaikan'. The view from the roof can be seen below.


The roof has some utilities for drying laundry... and barbed wire fence. Guess it's to keep panty-thieves away, hell I know. The kaikan is about 1.5 - 4 km away from the several campses that make the Tohoku University, mine is the closest one, called Seiryou-campus, which is dedicated for medical and dental studies. I'll try to post some pictures of the campus next time or so.

The first week here went basicly to findingout how to country works, or doesn't work, what I can get from where, where my laboratory is, etc etc...

I'll try to keep up blogging more or less regularly, so more stories and more images shouls appear on 'Mori no Miyako' in the future. ... What the Hell is Mori no Miyako you might ask. In short, it's nick name for Sendai, and it means 'Capital of Forests'. The name seems quite apt, as even from the roof of our dorm, we can see the rolling forests that surround this smallish town.

So my friends back in Finland and elsewhere, take care.