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.