Time to put some pictures online! And a few more words... : )

Let's start at the start: monday the 5th of Januari, snow in Brussels and an airport in chaos are the cause of a 4 hour delay of my first flight and me missing my connection flight to Tokyo in London. Of course this was understandable as there was "a lot of snow": a full 2 centimeters! : p How well... At least, for a reason I don't know, I got to fly in business class (more space then my legs are long, my God, am I really in a plane??) and we get free accomodation and meals at the Ibis Hotel in Heathrow as compensation for a 24 hour delay of schedule (they put me on the same flight, but a day later). As there were two Japanese girls with the same problem, we started talking and I had made my first contact with 2 people from the Japanese civilization, Mariko and Junko, huray! While waiting for boarding on the Tokyo flight the next day, we also got into a conversation with a guy from the UK, Luke, who is now teaching English for a few years at a Japanese school outside of Tokyo. He lives at a place next to a skiing area, so when I visit him I might go for some skiing! An unexpected potential fun activity! : ) (of which there will hopefully be more!)

Arrived in Tokyo and carrying along 3 bags plus an 8 hour jetlag, I make the 2+ hour trip from the airport far east of Tokyo to my guesthouse in the west of Tokyo: first impression -> good and efficient but very expensive public transport. Second and next 118 impressions will be published later in a 500+ page report. I'm only here for 2 days now, but it's already clear that Japan and it's people are a mix of known and unknown looks, habits and characteristics. One funny habit is that most restaurants or food bars have perfect plastic replicas of what their dishes look like on display in their display window (see picture). But people are very friendly I must say. Apearantly theft and crime is almost non-existent here.

Arrived at my room it strikes me what a quite neighbourhood I'm in. I knew it was a certain distance from central Tokyo, but still, I hadn't expected such a quite and calm area. Good for my sleep at night : ). My room (see pictures!) is really nice! "When I grow up" I want to have tatamis (Japanese mats) in the rooms of my house as well. No shoes in the house, only slippers (or something like it) in the hallway and kitchen etc. and bare feet or socks in the bedrooms, which is very nice, clean, relaxing and comfortable I must say. In this house there are also 2 Japanese girls/women, a Korean girl, an Indian guy who's never here and again (like in Sweden) a German person! : ) Tracy's her name, and she's studying Japanese and is here on a working holiday for one year. She's very kind and has helped me already quite a lot showing me around (the cheaper shops etc.) and assisting/translating when I went for alien registration, traincard and for a mobile phone (of which the number is 080-3345-2772, should you have urgent messages).

Thursday I went to University and what I expected to be a half an hour introduction talk, turned out to become a completely filled day with meetings and presentations (which was mostly accidentally). But the people were really friendly and happy to have an extra member on the solar cell research team and the atmosphere and group of people was really lively. The nice thing is that the solar energy research group in Nakano lab is only half a year old and they're still in the growing/exploring phase, so in the next five months I'll be part of and actively participating in this "growing". And as I really have the feeling that my thesiswork and help can make a difference, I'm really looking forward to the next five months!

Today (Friday the 9th) consisted of shopping, getting a mobile phone, getting a public transport card, some cleaning and sorting things out and lunching in central Tokyo (at Shibuya, where this very cool picture by night was taken thursday evening when I went shopping for a power plug adaptor, as I had forgotten that the plugs here are different...). Shibuya was really really busy! But fun to walk through, it's the typical movie scene of Tokyo, as you might guess from the photo.

Well, there's probably loads more stuff to say, which's just slipping my mind right now, but this is a first general impression. Ooh yeah, people do indeed often stare at me and my hight. Better get used to it. : )

Knowing myself, don't expect blog updates every week, I tend to get lazy at this kind of stuff... Please forgive me... : )

I only post a few pictures here, a larger selection you can find on:
http://picasaweb.google.nl/Vincent.Vanderputten
I will blog and post more when I have more interesting photo's and things to tell!

All the best to everyone! ; )