Catching up

It has been a long time since I posted on my site. Sorry for that. You probably have seen the pictures I posted the last couple of days. October the 14th and 15th I have been to Himeji castle and to the Kibi National Youth Center in Okayama, about 4 hours by bus. Himeji Castle is one of the oldest surviving structures from the medieval times. It was rainy that day, so my pictures are pretty bad. Maybe I’ll go back there next year on a sunny day. That evening we stayed overnight at the Kibi
center. I didn’t sleep that long, the beds were too short and very hard. So I woke up really early to take some nice pictures from the sunrise. After that we explored the lake by rowboat. Pretty cool.

October the 12th I was introduced to my lab (Takemura Lab). The coming year I will do my first research at this lab. I’ve chosen “Design of a New Interface using Marker-based Augmented Reality Technology”. More details will follow later. Currently I’m reading a lot of papers about augmented reality and the current interfaces to get into this stuff. I’ve to come up with a more detailed description of my research by the 9th of November, but I can do basically anything I want, so that’s pretty
cool. If I need any new hardware for my research I can just ask for it and they will order the hardware as soon as they can. You’ll never see something like this on the University of Groningen. I’m just a stupid Computer Science student doing a minor and maybe even useless research here for a year and they even spend money on me.

October the 19th I was told to tell something about The Netherlands and my university to all the other OUSSEP students and people interested. Everyone did their presentation that day, it took 5 years and I was one of the last :/. I didn’t prepare anything for my speech, except for the Keynote slides (I didn’t use powerpoint, yay). It was my first real presentation in English, so I was pretty nervous. Actually it became my best presentation ever. I could not forget my text, beceause I had none, this happened a lot of time to me with presentations in Holland. Really interesting.

A few weeks ago I also met a Japanese girl who is interested in the Dutch language. We’ve been to Namba and to the only Dutch restaurant in Japan. The Dutch food was really good. Soon I’m going with her to Awaji Island. An island west of Osaka. Awaji island merely consists of flat land with some
minor mountains. From the pictures I’ve seen I would call it the “Groningen of Japan”. They even have cows! :D Anyway, I learn a lot Japanese from her, more than I ever could learn from the university lessons. I think she’ll be one of the best friends I ever had (ほんと、if you are reading this :P).

A few days ago I received a letter from YahooBB, my NTT telephone line will be activated November the 1st. Let’s hope my modem will arrive on the same day so that I finally can enjoy having fast and trustworthy internet.

Blabla, I’ll try too write shorter stories more often next time. Long stories are boring. As soon as my Japanese skills are good enuf, I’ll try to write some Japanese too :)