Arrival in Japan (more than a year ago)

This article has been a long time in coming. I know I said my next article would be of Meidaisai (Nagoya University festival), but it seems the festival my be postponed because of an outbreak of measils (although I'm immune to measils, it seems others may not have received an MMR shot in the past or are not longer immune).

The picture that I included is from my friend Celso (Brazil) and was taken on April 5, 2006 (the day after I arrived in Japan). We are on the Shinkansen headed to Nagoya from Tokyo. On this trip, I met many of my friends that I have today (Celso-Brazil, Fausto-Brazil, Paul-Equador, Felippe-Brazil, and others). I remeber that day, it doesn't really seem as though it was that long ago. I guess a lot has changed since that day (I was 22 years old the time that picture was taken and now I'm 24). I don't remember the guy next to me, I think he is and Engineer from Taiwan. It took me about 2 months before I memorized all of my friends names (I'm bad with names). For about 6 weeks I was making it by without calling my friends by their names and just refering to them as 'you' (which is perfectly acceptable in English, but not in Japanese). I finally memorized my friend from the Philippines name when he was wearing a name tag one day. I still don't know the name of everyone in my lab and I've been here for more than a year. That's probably a bad thing.

Since I arrived here I have made a lot of friends from all over the world. And as one would expect, they are all just like everyone else (in other words, they are no different from you or myself...the same as the average American). Thinking about it, I have friends from Brazil, Equador, the Philippines, Palestine, Jordan, Amebia (that's in Africa and might be spelled wrong), Japan, Mongolia, Iran, Cambodia, China, etc... Maybe I have too many friends. At the very least, I got that much from my experience in Japan.

The other day I went and got my younger sister (who just turned 15 years old) a couple birthday gifts for her new computer. If one goes to the big shopping center in Osu during the weekday it is not that crowded (so it was okay).

These days I don't really get to do anything anymore. Over the summer I have a couple internships that I must go to (which will last all summer long), but I also plan on going to a island in the Japanese inland sea called Shiraishi (white-stone island). I want to meet a writer who lives there and works for the Japan Times (so that should be fun, although it will only last for a day or two). I can't really do experiments for another week or so, because the machine that I need to create samples is broken at the moment. Other than that, I am currently working on my graduate school applications for the USA once again (Plus I'm going to take the GRE later this month). I'll have to write about my experience taking the GRE again. Also, I have to tell my professor that I want to leave and I need his recommendation to get into graduate school in the US. I really really hope that turns out okay.

Not much to talk about so I guess I'll say good night.

Adios

-Ben

(No quote tonight, I'm not in the mood)