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