it’s my life

Apart from the background of the flag there are more white things I noticed in
Japan.

First one is the white mask, similar to those that the dentists use, that some
people use in public spaces such as metro, bus and so on.

What are those things for? It is no more no less than a sign of respect for the
healthy ones: they are sick and they don’t want to spread their sickness. Useful?
No idea, has anyone in the room the statistics around?

The other white thing are the white squared small cars, a.k.a. “the fridges”,
“koelkasten” in Dutch. They are f*cking ugly, a sample will be available some day in my Gallery.

Don’t you feel like opening it and grabbing a “Kirin” beer? I do.

Lately we have been eating really a lot: sushi, teri-yake and even hamburguers for breakfast. Together with the lack of sleep and the jet-lag, the mix is not really good.

We were in the bus to a company and Ronald, from the organizing committee (OC) suddenly looked like a balloon-fish. He started to puke and half of the bus was covered with his food left-overs. I could escape from the flood literally for centimeters.

Later we were visiting the company research lab. A nice Japanese woman was showing us the terrace while explaining that it was the gathering point for smokers. One of the employees was lightning a cigarette up in the background while our Erik was leaning against the balcony, maybe with the same intentions. No. He started to puke, and the Japanese woman covered his laughing mouth.

Later came Maarten, and my guessing for numbers 4 and 5 is Pascal and Freek.

Soon I will write something about the mouth masks, another Japanese icon. Now we are going to sleep and digest the McDonald’s dinner, that hopefully is safe enough.

There are two things that so far have impressed me a lot. First of all, I really can’t understand the signs, excepting those for the toilets.

Second impression: Japanese people are really nice. Two examples: the cabin crew in the airplane was telling me “Sorry for the delay in bringing the food”, “Thank you very much, we are proud of having you here” and so on. We went to a restaurant for dinner and even if we were supposed to use the touch-screen automated waiter service a waiter came to us to try to explain the menu in her poor English.

Now, as a Japanese would say: “I feel deeply sorry to inform you that I must stop writing due to the jet lag effects and because it is re”

In a few minutes I will leave to Rotterdam and tomorrow I will fly to Japan. Currently I am doing a list in my mind of the things I shouldn’t forget.

Yesterday we went to a traditional Japanese restaurant in Borne. I must say that the food was delicious. We had a cook cooking just in front of us and the process was quite impressive. I guess that Japanese are more similar in that sense to Spanish people than for Dutch. The lastest just want to have the food as soon as possible, while Spanish cooking takes more time and some people even enjoy it.

I guess that my next post will come from Japan.

It feels like it was yesterday when I told Jorrit: “Hey, it seems that some guys are going to Japan“. In a couple of days we were in an office asking for information. Today we finished all the previous work, after all it is a study trip, and now it is time to pack the stuff and go.

I might say I am quite excited. I have learnt that Japan is a totally different country, the cultural shock is going to be 100 times bigger than when I moved to the Netherlands.

In eight days we will take the airplane to Japan. After several hours of trip we will arrive to the land of the rising sun. Then we will spend three weeks visiting companies: Toyota, Sharp, Nintendo, NEC… We will learn what is happening there in the topic of Smart Surroundings. Smart Surroundigs is the technology that will allow our fridge to know that meat is not longer good, we drank all the beer last night, and we have a last minute appointment. Our cars will avoid collisions because the road told it that there is an accident ahead. We will know where our children are, if they have fever or not, and they will have a PDA that thell them where their favourite toy is. Sounds good? It is.

From now on I will write here some stuff about my trip. I will do it in English as a courtesy to my groupmates because my Dutch stills sucks (not as much as my Japanese) and they haven’t learnt Spanish yet. And everyone in Spain speaks good English, right?

Konnichiwa.