Oppama

Spent my morning off wandering around Oppama. It turns out there are cemeteries along the

edge of every hill (so a lot), and every cemetary has a nice little temple, with a nice little garden. The graves are all of dark marble with a little encense holder, and they are all very well kept up, with fresh flowers and small wooden prayer sticks. Most have a little cup or bowl, but I am not sure what they are for.

I am still fascinated by the amount of work everyone puts into their small gardens. Today's picture is of a garden outside a couple of flats, where the garbage pick-up is. Yet it still has trimed trees and a little pond and an ornamental toad.

Even the sewer plates are decorated. Most are iron coloured with flower imprints, but some are in colour, with a crowned cat doing various things. Maybe water for the fire engines? That's what the cat seems to be doing on this one.

Japanese curios

A photo of the JAMSTEC headquarters where I work. It's a bit like everything else around here. The buildings are all of the square white type, but the gardens are laid out with small paved paths running amongst the shaped trees and standing stones. There are also more sports facilities than I've seen in a while : a pool, volleyball and football fields, tennis courts, ping pong tables... All that for the 45 minutes beween the end of lunch and 1pm, when the loudspeakers play Big Ben for the end of the pause.

This evening, someone brought sweets to the lab, and so I got to taste... sweet bean patties filled with jam. They are not at all as bad as you might think. They mostly taste of honey, and not at all of beans. Still, I think I'll stick with the salty bean crackers. So far, everything I've had here has been very good. Unfortunately I'm not sure what most of it is, and I would not know how to actually make it.

Life here really is different from what I'm used to. The shuttle bus was a bit late tonight, so everyone was waiting outside for it. All in a row. Even when the bus was pulling up outside the main door the people would come out and walk in front of the bus in order to get to the back of the queue. Also when the bus arrives at the station people will stay in their seat untill all the rows in front of them are clear before getting up. And of course, everyone walks down the left side of the sidewalk, and stands on the left side on escalators. I tend to forget that every time I go outside....

And finally, a little note on the toilets. The ones at the guest house are the "simple" ones, with only a heated seat. At JAMSTEC, you have this choice :

Actually the one on the right is quite safe if you make sure you don't touch any of the buttons.

Monday, the start of my first week.

The weather here is cool but sunny, so it's a pleasure to go out in the morning. There is a JAMSTEC shuttle bus that leaves from Oppama station every 10 minutes between 8 and 9, so getting to work is a treat. I now have an identification badge for the bus, and a badge for the doors and restorant, and a badge for the library. And the japanese style is to have all that hanging around your neck on a string.

I have a desk by myself in a little alcove off the main room where all the people work. There are about 12 people in the room total. I got presented to everyone at the Monday morning meeting, and explained why I was here. It will take a while before I get everyone's name and face down, but that will be helped by the fact they all wear their badges.

Dhugal took me on a tour of the whole headquarters this morning. They have some cute little aquariums all over the place with whale bone experiments and isopodes and other deep-sea worms. They also have some fish, but it was feeding time when we went by there and so we couldn't all fit in the room.

The research catamaran Kaiyo is at the dock

now, and we got to go up on it. It's a 61m long by 28m wide boat, that can hold pretty much any given amount of equipment. It also has a special kind of steering that allows it to stay in one place by going slightly side to side instead of simply forward and back.

I also got to see all their ROVs. They have 4 functional ones and a fifth one that's there just for show, as it's made up of all the spare parts for one of the others. The submarine was less impressive as it has been completely dismanteled for maintenance and there is only the

titanium shere and the metal armature left.

In the afternoon I started observing some ctenophores that had been brought in on Saturday and were still alive. To this day noone has ever managed to conserve a ctenophore, so it makes studying them a bit complicated. I had to look for all the canals and comb rows that are important for species determination. Dhugal did a little review of all the important parts with me on a better microscope, just to find out that the one we have is not quite shaped like it's supposed to be. We will study it more closely tomorrow, hoping it hasn't desintegrated by then. (photo is the lab where the specimens are kept)

As I promissed in Villefranche I bought a tin of hot coffee from the vending machine. It wasn't great, but wasn't at all bad, for being a tin of coffee from a vending machine... I will have to test the other stuff from the machine, just to see what it is.

Japan!

1st day in Japan!

I arrived safe and sound after an uneventful couple of flights. I even had a smooth transition to japanese cuisine with pork shoga yaki and it's rice and vegetables for lunch, accompanied by a very french camembert slice.

At Narita airport I took the "limousine bus" to Yokohama, with a great view of Tokyo's Disneyland and of all the shipping facilities along the coast. I met Dhugal at Yokohama and he showed me which trains to take to get to Oppama. The town is in 3 main parts: the docks, with JAMSTEC squeezed in, the shopping, banking and office area, and then lots of little residential areas, all clustered around the feet of the little hills surrounding the office district. We had lunch it a cute little restaurant, and I did not do badly at all with the chopsticks. Dhugal is really a very nice guy, and I'm sure he will be fun to work with.

The house I'm in is about half-way up one of these hills, and you have to wander down narrow little alleys and stairways to get there. It's very nice, as nearly all the fences are polished wood, and all the trees are pruned into shapes.

My room in itself is actually biggger than I thought it would be. And I like the house very much, as it has a very japanese style to it.



A very fun day today, but the trip was quite exhausting. I hope to be able to appreciate things better tomorrow.