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RavenCell213
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Name: R
Interests: Playing Guitar, Video Editing, Audio Recording, Multimedia related production, Paintball & Airsoft, Anime and Movies
Expertise: Technology & Music & Art
Occupation: Artist
Industry: Entertainment
Message: message me
Member Since:
3/28/2003
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| This will be my last xanga entry from Osaka, Japan. This has been an amazing experience. I've learned so much these last 9 weeks and I've had so much fun. I've met a bunch of great people here :) I can't wait to come back again... maybe next year? ;) Anyway, this entry will wrap up the last few weeks:
So we went to another festival and saw the best fireworks in our entire life. It was kinda startling at first how close we were to the fireworks. They have fireworks in cool shapes like hearts and doraemon hehe. I'm still always amazed at seeing the huge crowd of people that attend these festivals. Here's a sample of the spectacular fireworks hehe:
We also went to Nara, which is probably one of my favorite places simply because there are deer walking around all over the place. You can feed them if you want, but be prepared to have them all chase you at the same time hehe.
Here, we got to see the world's largest Buddha <-- I think that's right.
and inside:
We then went to ANOTHER festival hehe. At night, there were candles all over the place and around 7PM, people would go around and light the candles. These would sometimes be in patterns to make words or pictures.
With all the candles around, Nara had a pretty romantic atmosphere. You could see some couples rowing boats in this lake. We watched as two couples crashed into each other =P
Tetsuya, Laura, and Ayano came to visit me! :) Thanks to all my friends in Japan who came to visit me (Tetsuya, Laura, Ayano, Yuki, Satoshi, Hanako :) We spent the day hanging out at Namba and of course we had to get Kiboken again at Dotomburi hehe.
Yesterday, we went to the Osaka Aquarium. This place was pretty cool. I really like baby sea otters!! But they move too fast so it was hard to take a good picture of them. The dolphins also moved too fast.
I saw the silliest looking fish at the aquarium. I think it's called a mambo or something? Anyway, I learned that its skin is really fragile (notice no scales) so they had to put a net around it so that it wouldn't get hurt running into the glass.
And lastly, we saw uhm... these. They look like aliens haha:
Thank you so much everyone at Osaka University Cybermedia Center and BioGrid. I had a great time in Osaka and hope to see you guys again (in Japan or in the US). Here's a picture of the gang at the farewell party:
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| Sorry I'm really bad with keeping up with Xanga. Things in Japan are still great and all but I am missing California a bit. There are some things I really miss like boba, my ipod, and my guitar heh. I haven't updated in about two weeks and a lot has happened so I'll just post some pictures about the main things that have happened:
We went to Osaka Castle. I went there last year but it was cool to see it again. It really is a very beautiful building. It's pretty interesting in that there's an elevator in the middle of the castle... kinda unexpected huh hehe:
We went on a lab trip which was a lot of fun. We were originally going to go on a boat ride but that didn't happen, so we went to Yoro Park instead. There's a greart waterfall there and supposedly, if you drink from it, you will have a long life. Here is Ichikawa-san drinking some of the water at Yoro Park:
Later at night, after onsen (I've done that once in my life... and once is enough for me heh) and a really fancy dinner, we played with fireworks. Here is Mao-kun playing with fireworks:
Afterwards, everyone came to our room to have a party. mm.. I think the picture explains itself:
The next day we went to Takeshima. It's like... an island that you can walk to. Since the sea level is lower than ground level here, you can walk across this muddy area and get to the island. Or you can use the bridge like we did:
Our final stop for the lab trip was Nagoya Castle. I didn't get any good pictures of the outside of the castle because it was raining a lot, so here's a glimpse of the castle:
There are lots of festivals here. When there's a festival, the train stations and streets are flooded with people. The festival itself was interesting, but the number of people that were there to see it was even more interesting. It was really hard to take pictures of the main events of the festival (boats and fireworks) since there were so many people and trees. Look at how many people there are:
One of the new friends that I made here is actually a lecturer from Taiwan. He is also working on tiled display walls. He was here for three days. I attended two of his lectures; they were quite interesting (I got to learn about the kind of technology they're using versus the technology I'm working with). Here we are having a late late late night dinner with him and Nozaki-sensei:
Last weekend, I got to see my friends Satoshi and Yuki again! I haven't seen them for a long time so it was sooo great to see them. Hopefully, they'll be able to come visit me again! We spent most of the time wandering around Umeda. We got to eat Ippudo again and got to make our own Takoyaki. We're all really bad at making Takoyaki hehe:
So that's what has been happening lately. Hopefully some more of my friends in Japan will be able to come visit me this weekend. I'll update my Xanga when I have time. Hope you enjoy the pictures and my little blurbs.
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| We had a long 3 day weekend last week because Monday was a holiday. We did a lot of stuff. It was a fun and tiring weekend. On Friday, we went with Peter Arzberger (our PRIME Program Coordinator) to Kyoto where the festivals were starting. I don't remember the last time I saw so many people in the streets. It was pretty amazing. Mostly, people were just buying food and playing carnival games.
The small streets were so narrow that it took forever to walk through all the people. We were afraid of not being able to find each other, so we had to try really hard to stay close together. There were so many booths. I like the kimonos and yukatas that people were wearing. Here is a picture of Marshall in the midst of the crowd.
The next day (Saturday), we hung out with Junko who we met on the plane and her friend. We went to a Chinese restaurant at Senri-chuo. Chinese food here isn't too great, but oh well. I learned a lot of Japanese that night, or at least I hope I did.
Afterwards, we went to the craziest place to celebrate Cathy's birthday. It was called... Beaver World so something like that. We just call it Bb. They had everything there. It was like Palace Park on steroids. You could read manga, play video games, play air hockey, karaoke, play in the band room studios, play bowling, play airsoft, etc. etc. We spent about six hours in there - half the spent was spent karaoke-ing hehe.
We didn't get home until about 4AM so we woke up late... around 12PM the next day. We went to Kyoto to meet up with Marshall's friend Daisaku and his girlfriend also named Junko. The main place we visited was a Sake brewery where we learned about the history of sake and got to try sake. There was one interesting guy who was demonstrating to us the bottle cap of one of the sake bottles. He introduced himself as "Bond...James Bond" and he says that "his mission is impossible". heh.. anyway
Later that night, we went to eat a really really fancy restaurant. It was located in a pretty cool building. I don't know how to describe it but here's a picture that kind of gives you a glimpse of what it looks like.
The restaurant was pretty expensive, but the food was delicious. It was one of those restaurants where they give you tiny tiny portions. The most interesting thing we ordered was long long sausage. I kept drinking cassis drinks. I forgot what cassis is exactly, but it's a pretty delicious fruit.
This last picture lets you see what my apartment looks like. Everything in Japan is small compared to the United States. It's most obvious when you walk into an apartment. It's small but quite good enough for me for these 9 weeks. I'm living pretty comfortably. =)
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| Since I get a lot of questions about what I'm doing here in Japan every day, I figured it'd be easier to put an extry in my xanga about it. Basically, I'm learning about and working on tiled display systems. Think of them as very large high resolution displays. They're useful for scientific research and situations where many applications must be open at once. I'm basicallly learning about how they work. Then, I'm trying to implement software to utilize the tiled display systems. Here is an example of a tiled display systems at work:
I'm here with three other students from UCSD. We're all here through an Internship Abroad Program in collaboration with PRAGMA to learn about culture and about our specific fields. Daniel, Marshall, and Cathy are working on more biology related projects. This is the tiled display system that I'm currently working with. The wallpaper is not usually this heh. You can see how big it is by comparing it to how big Marshall is.
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| This is my second major update. Looks like I'm doing about one post a week. Anyway, we recently visited the Umeda area, Shisaibashi area, Dohtonburi area, and Namba Area. Last Saturday, which is two days ago, we explored the Umeda area.
Cathy and Daniel look at the map in the subway so we can decide what the best route to Den Den Town is.
Den Den Town is basically an area filled with electronics stores and anime stores heh.
An example of one of the shops at Den Den Town is the appropriately named "Sanctuary of Otaku". It's pretty amazing how many toys and things these stores can cram into tiny spaces.
They even have entire stores devoted to selling Gundam merchandise. I have to admit it's pretty impressive. There are so many gundam models to choose from, but they're all really expensive.
The Dohtonburi area is probably one of the busiest places in Osaka. It's really a visually stimulating place. Lots of flashy signs and colorful things... everywhere. If you want to play pachinko, this is the place to go to. There are also lots of ramen places to go to here.
On Saturday, we took forever to find a katsu place. When we finally found a katsu place, it tatsed soooo delicious hehe. Sorry for the blurry picture:
I though that this was picture worthy. In the Shinsaibashi area, there are a bunch of these lamps that look like art mannequins. I don't know why, but I kept taking pictures of them. Some of them have a lot of security cameras mounted on them... makes me think of I Robot.
One of the great toys to get... Geekman! Here, Ichikawa-san is examining the toy. mmm... ok, I don't have much else to say about it.
And now... my favorite subject... ramen! So we went to this place called Kiboken. Their ramen tastes really good! but still not as good as Ippudo's ramen. However, they give you a lot of meat so that made me really happy. Congratulate Daniel for eating the really really spicy ramen.
This is one of my favorite areas. This is part of the Dohtonburi area. I guess I just like how there's this river in the middle of all the busyness.
And I leave you once again with food. Here is shaved ice! It's really hot and humid here so a cold dessert is always appreciated. Right after I took this picture, my ice cream fell off onto the table.
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