Merry Christmas and a Yoi Otoshi wo!

Hej again!

Winter is here, even though it is more like autumn to me. The leaves that became red and yellow last month have now begun to fall from the trees and I feel a sting in my cheeks from the cold when I go out in the mornings. The stores are decorated for the holidays with fake snow and small lights in blue, green and red. I'm not expecting any snow for Christmas Eve but I think I will get into the mood until then. Especially because I got a big box of things from my parents two days ago. Thank you!! Actually I already opened it, haha. I couldn't restrain myself...

I'm going to Natsuko next weekend. There is a seminar at school on Saturday and I'm getting on the Shinkansen right after that. Monday is a National Holiday so I'm gonna stay in Osaka for 3 nights and head back to Tokyo with the first train on Tuesday morning. School finishes the 28th and I'm gonna be at Natsuko's parents' place over New Year (Oshougatsu). We plan to go to Nagoya as well, since the holiday will last until the 7th. Pretty nice!

Haven't been traveling much lately. I think I mentioned it before, that this period would mean a lot of work for me. I've been to school in the weekends for seminars and meetings, and haven't had time to go anywhere far. But the work has paid off. I have made a molecule that shows a liquid crystalline phase (columnar) and that I will probably be able to bring back home to Stockholm to do some diffusion measurements on. It's not perfectly pure yet so I might need to work on that, but at least it seems like I will have something to bring back home next year. Feels good.

A couple of weeks ago I helped Natsuko's dad prepare some persimmon fruit (kaki) for drying. This is called Hoshigaki - 'hanging persimmon'. What you do is to peel them, heat them shortly in boiling water and then dip them in strong sake (shouchu). I ended up getting 6 of them to bring home to my apartment to dry myself, and I have tried to document the drying process with my Lumix. Check it out in my Photobucket!
http://s221.photobucket.com/albums/dd137/antonfrise/
There you can also see a night view from a skyscraper in Shinjuku, where I went today. Slideshows 'Shinjuku Government Buildings' and 'Hoshigaki in the autumn' are new!

God Jul!

Onsen, museums and the usual stuff

My life goes on here in Tokyo. The work is progressing slowly, I'm still struggling with the organic reactions and almost everyday I discover new ways to fail in getting a pure product. It's a bit of a mess but I still learn a million things per week so I guess it's good for me, huh?

It's getting colder here, the temperature has fallen down to 10-15C. It's not that bad compared to Stockholm in November, but as the insulation of Japanese houses is a joke the indoor temperature is not that much higher. So I've bought myself a nice fleece sweater and a real futon (bed cover) to battle the cold. Another way to keep warm is to go to an onsen (natural hot spring). Two weekends ago I went with Tomo, Shin-chan and Ma-chan to Tochigi prefecture, two hours north of Tokyo by train. We spent a night at Kita Onsen, an old traditional hot spring in the mountains. Very remote and isolated. The minshuku (Japanese inn) was an old house that reminded me of Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away, Miyazaki Hayao) and there were several different baths to soak in, both indoors and outdoors. At night they turned of the lights and we enjoyed the hot water with beautiful stars above us. I had brought a package of Absolute Five (five flavours of vodka) and we tried all of them many times and compared the Swedish alcohol with Hakkaizan (wonderful Japanese sake) and beer. The next day, despite the hangover that was just slightly cured by a morning bath, we climbed one of the peaks close by and experienced the first snowfall of this winter.

Last weekend Natsuko came here for 4 days. We spent one night at her parents place, again enjoying her mothers wonderful cooking. Then we took the buss to Sengokuhara in Hakone, a mountain resort two hours west of Tokyo and thus close to Mt Fuji. The main goal was the Pola Museum, were they are now showing Monet and other impressionists in a special exhibition. Both I and Natsuko have since our stay in Paris this summer begun to like paintings by Monet, Pissarro, Cézanne and so on, and the visit to Pola Museum was great. Another sweet thing was the private onsen of the hostel we stayed at. You could book it for half an hour at a time and have it all by yourself! We also visited the Venetian Glass Museum and a museum for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the writer of The little Prince (Le Petit prince).

Back in Tokyo we went to one last museum for the weekend. This time it was an exhibition by Philadelphia Museum of Arts with more impressionist art, but also surrealism and cubism with works by Dalí, Picasso and Duchamp.

As you can see I spend all my time working in the weekdays and all my time playing in the weekends. From now that might change a little, they have scheduled some "Laboratory Seminars" during the following Saturdays so I won't be able to go on any long trips. Too bad...

Check out the pictures in my Photobucket!
http://s221.photobucket.com/albums/dd137/antonfrise/
My trips to Kita Onsen and Hakone and the view of Mt Fuji from the door of my apartment.

Take care!

Now with pictures

I made a Photobucket account to show you some pictures! Follow the link below, you will find some slideshows a bit down on the page. You can also watch the pictures from the albums, links are on the left side of the main page.

http://s221.photobucket.com/albums/dd137/antonfrise/

Enjoy!

My first month

It's almost 4 weeks since I came to Tokyo and I've manage to create something that could be called an everyday-life.

I wake up around 8.30am in morning and have some bread with walnuts and bottled milk tea for breakfast. I call Natsuko on the cell phone and we talk while I get ready to leave for school. The phones have loudspeakers so I can get dressed and brush my teeth while talking.

The walk from my apartment to the subway station (Yoyogi-Uehara on the Chioda Line) takes about 15 minutes. I always get on the 9.17 train, the ride is 14 stations and takes about half an hour. I pass by many of the big central places, like Hibiya and Omotesando and every morning I see all the classics images of Tokyo subway: jam-packed trains full of office-workers playing portable videogames, reading books and sleeping. I get of at Nezu station and walk another 10 minutes to get to the university and my lab.

We start everyday at 10am. This is an important time and it's bad to be late. My project has just begun so I've been reading articles and books most of the time to get some basic knowledge. Last week I started doing experiments but my background is not organic synthesis so I need quite a lot of help. The work is interrupted by sporadic(?) lectures and seminars.

I finish somewhere between 10 and 11pm (and this is no exaggeration). The days are very, very long. Everyone else is also working late so that helps motivating me. I kind of see it as a competition.. if they can do it, so can I. But more important is that my project is very, very cool and I learn an incredible amount of new stuff all the time. So I don't feel a strong desire to go home early... yet.

I take the subway home and pick up some bread for the next day's breakfast at the local FamilyMart or 7Eleven. I usually make it home before 11.30pm. I watch some TV, read and talk to Natsuko again. Most nights I get more than 7 hours sleep.

It's quite a nice life. I get a lot of stuff done at work. I walk 50 minutes every day and do 50 push-ups every evening. I can listen to almost a full album of music on the subway and I'm reading my second book since I came here.

The week-ends have been busy. Natsuko has been here once and we met with her parents and brother. I went to her place in Osaka 10 days ago and we visited the royal palace in Kyoto together with her sister. This weekend all the people from the lab went on a school-trip to the mountains for a sleep-over in a ryoukan. We had some excellent food and I had a bath in an onsen for the first time since coming here. Next weekend I will go with Tomo and some friends to another onsen. I'll write about that next time!

Take care

A thought

In Tokyo people don't look at me so much, at least not compared to when I was in Osaka. Here they never stare at me. Sometimes I notice a glance, but they always divert their eyes quickly.

I had dinner with Tomo and Sachi yesterday. Yakiniku at Shibuya. A really good moment. I hadn't met Tomo for about half a year and Sachi for more than 2 years and it was really, really good to see them again. Both seem to have gotten used to Tokyo, which is nice since they thought that the big crowds of Tokyo seemed like a crazy festival in the begining. Tomo's opinion is that people here are more cold, more closed. Maybe this explains why I don't feel stared at. That, together with the fact that there are a lot of foreigners here. I guess poeple here are used to all kinds of faces. After the dinner I took the night-train home to the dorm. A classic packed subway. I didn't really need to hold on to anything, I couldn't fall over anyway. And when I arrived to my station I realized that I was on the wrong side of the wagon and just barely made it out to the platform before the doors closed.

Yesterday was the first day in the lab. Everyone is nice and kind to me. And Professor Kato seems like a very good supervisor. Things are moving on very, very fast. I used some of their equipment (polarized optical microscopy, they call it "pomu") to look at Ichikawa's liquid crystals (LC) the first day. And today I began some experiments to synthesize my own LCs. Note that this is the second day in school...

Tomorrow Natsuko is coming here.

Good night!

I've arrived

So I'm back in Japan. Took the train from Narita Airport to Ueno Stn, the Skyliner express. It takes something like 1 hour. Most of what I saw at first was rice fields, small houses and shrines. Then more houses. The city getting more and more dense. Office workers in suits, school children in their uniforms, housewives in soft trousers and square-shaped jackets on bicylces. After 30 minutes this all felt normal again. No problem adapting. Another half an hour and I was in culture chock. Tokyo isn't Osaka. It's more. More intense, more chaotic, more of a mess. I had to look hard to find a straight angle. Subway trains shot out of tunnels under me. I could have touched the buildings we passed with the train, if only the windows were possible to open. The city doesn't look as if it's built, it's more like an organism. Growing, moving and puffing.

Still, maybe this is only true for Ueno. Tokyo is a huge city. 10 million people live here. The number of places to visit is overwhelming.

Me and Ichikawasan (my tutor here) went around a lot (7-8 train rides in one afternoon) to register me at a number of places, get me an insurance and so on. He's a really nice guy! I'll meet with Prof Kato tomorrow. That's gonna be cool.

My aparment is small and cosy. 13 m2. It doesn't feel that cramped. Dark wooden floors and a balcony facing down-town Tokyo helps keeping the atmosphere up. And it's cheap! 10 000 Yen / month. There are some very japanese solution for the lack of space. 1) I have a shower unit. This is a toilet, a place for washing my face and a shower, everything crowded on 1 m2! It features many movable parts and a high risk for flooding! 2) My bed is foldable and becomes a shelf when I don't use it. 3) My desk unfolds like a transformer... Ok, that last was a bit of an exaggeration ;)

So everything is fine. But I'm tired and jetlagged.

Take care.

Last morning in Sweden

Ok, I'm leaving.

See you!

Getting emotional

So it’s 10 days left until I leave and I am, maybe not surprisingly, having mixed feelings about this. After two years in Sweden I kind of got used to living here … again. It was just yesterday that I walked up through campus to my lab and got the feeling that this was really normal, you know, as it should be. I had found my everyday life. And then I realized that, in two weeks this will have changed, my life will change, again, and I couldn’t help feeling a bit sad about it. I like what I’m doing now, and I like the people that I do it with. The safest way to play would have been to stay with this.

But, as some might now, I always want safe, but I never choose it. Luckily, I’m not walking out on the thinnest of ice. I've done this before in a way. And I’ve heard a lot about the place where I’m going and it seems very all right.

And really, there’s nothing else I want to do. This is it. I got lucky.

To leave my family and friends here will of course be hard. I'm not getting used to that, eventhough this isn't the first time. I am truly grateful for all the support. I will miss you.

So, take care.

Genkidene.

元気でね

The Plan

Dates:

Leave from Stockholm Monday 15th of October, 1pm. Arrive to Narita (Tokyo) 16th of October, 9am. Note that the time difference between Sweden and Japan is 7 hours (8 in wintertime).

Home in Stockholm again in the middle of March 2008. Apply for a new VISA. Back to Tokyo in the begining of April.

Return to Stockholm in April 2010.

Note that this might change depending on what will happen with my Monbusho (文部科学省) scholarship.

Things to do before leaving:

Wrap things up at work
Meet with people
Buy gifts (おみやげ), all ideas are welcome!
Study kanji (漢字)

Hej!

This page is for me to ventilate my impressions and feelings about my life in Tokyo, the place where I will be living for the next few years. How I ended up going to Japan? It's a long story. Let's say it started with Judo and continued with Japanese language studies, though always as a hobby. My interest in Japan got a boost from staying in Osaka as an exchange student for one year. And I've had this idea about going back to Japan for some time now.

What about the name in the URL? Well, Carl Peter Thunberg was a Swedish botanic and student of Carl von Linné, who you might know of. In 1770 he went out on a journey that took him from Uppsala in Sweden to South Africa and then all the way to Nagasaki in Japan. The journey lasted for 9 years and during this time he collected and catalogued a huge number of plants. He wrote a book based on what he had found, Flora Japonica, and this work became the first scientific exchange between Sweden and Japan. That was 240 years ago.

I am a graduate student at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden and I will do a part of my research at the University of Tokyo. Though I hold no dreams of having the same impact on science as Thunberg had, I am happy to continue this long history of scientific exchange. Hopefully it will continue for another 240 years!

I plan to write often and short. Quantity instead of quality..erhm? We'll see how it goes. Since my situation will be that of a normal Japanese college student I guess I won't spend much time outside of the lab, eat all my meals in the school canteen and use my 13m2 room for nothing but sleeping.

Believe it or not, I'm actually looking forward to this a lot!