omar eduardo’s blog | 御丸「オマル」のブログ

Business ~

July 2nd, 2009

These past few days have been quite eventful. After my super long post about the Kyoto Trip I’ll attempt to keep this one on the short side.

Monday I woke up early and posted pictures on facebook before attending our weekly lab seminar/journal club. I went to the seminar, in which I barely understood anything, and then at around 11:30am came back to the lab. In my e-mail was a reply from Kimura-taisho, the president of Webshark. I replied right away because I was looking forward to meeting him that night.

And how did I get to meet Kimura-Taisho, you may wonder? I’ll be chronological about what lead to it.

During the fall term last year I started attending the MIT Japanese Lunch Table. The Japanese Lunch Table allows students to talk to Japanese people and do a language exchange. This one day I was there, and across from me was this young, nice Japanese guy. I decided to talk to him, he gave me a good first impression. Masato-san was his name, but his friends called him ‘Masa’. He had graduated and was in Boston for 6 months just to practice and improve his English. Once he was done, he would return to Tokyo and start working for Morgan Stanley. He was such an interesting guy, and it so happens that he was looking for a language exchange partner, so we agreed to meet again.

We met a few times for lunch, dinner, lunch, dinner… lunch… and yeah, dinner. I’m lying, we also did a few other things together like ice-skating and enjoying life. Masato-san was a pretty cool guy, and quite smart, so I enjoyed spending time with him. We talked about many things, from basic things like “American food is so bad” to more complicated topics like business, family and friends. It turns out that Masato-san had started his own businesses while he was in college, and he even managed to sell two of them! He was an entrepreneur, and quite a good one! I was quite excited to learn about this, so he told me a bit more about his businesses. It was great to hear about it, but I couldn’t quite grasp how you could simply go out there and make a business. It seemed harder to me than what he was telling me.

Anyway, after a few months having fun together, Masato-san had to return to Tokyo last March. Here is a picture of us the day before he departed Boston (It’s awesome, isn’t it!):

Before Masato-San left we agreed that when I got to Japan during this summer I would go visit him. I will, but not until August! :(

Although I still haven’t seen Masato-San, once I got to Japan he e-mailed Kimura-Taisho and asked him to meet with me. It turns out that Masato-san met Kimura-Taisho a while back and made a good impression on him, so Kimura-Taisho was glad to meet with me because Masato-san asked him to. So here I was in Osaka, Japan going to meet Kimura-Taisho thanks to a friendship I made 8 months ago in Boston. I was again surprised at how things turn out, you never know how things turn out, life is quite interesting.

I got to Taisho’s Company Entrance at 7:55pm but the front door was locked, and I was not expecting that. I was in a small room right off the elevator waiting to see if someone came out through the front door and I could then say something. There was a little phone on the corner, but what could I do with it? There was also a little card with a lot of Chinese characters and the number 37 written on it. At 8:02pm I realized no one was coming out of the office so I dialed the number, but hung-up cause I didn’t know where I was calling. A minute later a young girl open the door and signaled me to come in and said, I’m sorry!

I explained that I was there to see Kimura-Taisho, and she just nodded sort of like ‘not every day a foreigner shows up in our front door, I know who you are’, and she then directed me to the waiting room. It was a nice room, well-lit, with nice furniture and a glass table I loved. The young lady closed the door when she left, but then came back in with a cup of tea. I said thanks and took a sip, and withing a minute or so Kimura-Taisho walks into the room with two other guys and says, “Omar-Kun!”, in a friendly and lively tone that would have fooled anyone into thinking we already knew each other. He shook my hand and introduced himself right then. I was relieved, here was the president of the company being as nice as he could be, even using American customs to make me feel at home. The other two guys that came in with him also did the same, they introduced themselves in English and shook my hand. Kimura-Taisho then said, let’s go! He also asked me if I could speak Japanese, and I said the usual “just a bit” and he immediately turned to one of the two guys and told him “You can be the translator.”

Since it was raining Kimura-Taisho made sure I had an umbrella and then we headed downstairs. He asked me what I liked to eat, but I told him that anything was good… it’s Japanese food after all. Sashimi it was.

We went to a place nearby, a quite nice Japanese-style bar and got a table for the four of us, Kimura-Taisho, Masuda-San, Zhang-San, and me. We talked, had a few drinks, and a lot of delicious food. More than simply talking, that dinner allowed me to make a few new friends and to learn a lot from Kimura-Taisho. I was impressed by Kimura-Taisho, a man with no college degree who started multiple companies and made a living out of it, now presiding a company with a capital of nearly $800,000. When I asked how he started his business the story was quite intriguing and interesting. A few things he repeated that I think everyone should really understand. The key to success in business is knowing how to ask people for favors and who to ask.

Kimura-Taisho needed to implement a website, but he had not learned any programming. He had two options, sit at home and learn programming, or go out find someone who knew what he was doing, and ask him to do it. “Give up easily”, was his secret to success. Instead of sitting at home and learning how to program, he found a guy with 8 years of programming experienced and they worked together. By knowing who and how to ask, he had already saved 8 years of work that he would have needed if he tried to learn the skills this guy already had.

Very important lessons from that night were:

1) A great businessman surrounds himself with smart people who can do the things he can’t do.

2) Give up easily. By this he meant, know what you’re good at and do that, hire people to do the rest. If you need a website for your company, but you’re only good at managing a business, focus on managing the business and let someone else work on the site.

3) Be humble and nice. This was something you could appreciate from his own presence, always interested in what others had to say and quickly noticing the good things in others.

4) Friends and family come in first. What’s the meaning of money if you don’t have friends?

This night really made an impact in me, and I was able to meet some very interesting people. I will meet with them once again, at least, before I return to America, and I’m definitely looking forward to that. I definitely have a lot to learn from them, and I’m interested in learning more about their business, and about business in general.

Here is a picture of Kimura-Taisho, Zhang-San, and me:

I spent the next two days finishing up my application to Harvard Business School. Now it is done, I submitted it at 11pm last night (Japan time), which was 7 hours before the deadline. I really think the application reflects who I am, so all I can do is wait and see if they think it’s good. I really think that HBS’ MBA program is a great fit for me, and I would be honored to attend the program.

That’s all I have to update. My last three days have been quite business focused and work. I even been reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” while I commute to and from work, and I couldn’t recommend it more. It’s a great read. I’ll finish it first before saying anything more about it, though. :)

This is my update from now. I have truly come to appreciate many things about Japanese people and culture, and I’m very grateful for the opportunities I have had.

Kyoto Trip, Best Weekend in a long long time~

Written: June 28, 2009 5:50pm

This weekend was the MISTI-Japan Kyoto trip in which all the Japan interns went together to explore the ‘old capital’. It was one of the best weekends I’ve had, ever. Not only we had a great tour, visiting many beautiful and impressive temples, the food was also delicious and I met a lot of young, nice and energetic Japanese people. This really made the difference, particularly because Meru-san, Kim-san and I spent most of our time with two Japanese guys and we had a blast together.

My great weekend started Friday night when I left work at 7pm, the earliest I’ve ever left. It felt great to leave work while there was still some daylight. This made me seriously consider talking to my boss about my schedule, cause I don’t really think I’m expected to work until late (~10pm), especially since I come in at ~9am every day. I’m going to actually set the times I work in stone cause I know my MIT friends are working ‘regular’ work days, 9-6pm ish. Working a schedule like this would allow me to enjoy the city and meet more people. I love the people in my lab, but unfortunately most of them are too busy with their science and we can’t even manage to grab lunch or dinner together more than once a week.

Friday at 8pm I met Meru-san at the Juso train station and took her to Juso Ramen. I ordered something different from what I always order, and it wasn’t as delicious, so I’m going back to the usual next time. Meru-san had a regular bowl of ramen, and according to her it was good. That probably means it wasn’t delicious — maybe there is only one delicious bowl of ramen there.

After dinner we went to the conbini, and then we returned to my apartment. Once there we tried to figure out how to tie the obi in one of her kimonos, but that didn’t particularly work out. There’s a reason why they had geishas go to school back in the day, knowing how to tie a kimono was probably one of them. After taking a couple of pictures and having some fun, we went to bed at around 1am so we could get early in the morning. In the morning we took the 5:30ish train from Juso to Umeda station, and then the 6am train from Osaka JR station, to Kyoto. The whole trip was less than an hour.

Now this is when the fun started. We began the day by going to a public bath place. It is exactly just what you think, or maybe even more interesting. You go in, get naked in the locker rooms, cover what you can with a mini-towel (one of those that people carry around for when they sneeze, or to shower, etc.) and go out there to join the rest of the world that decided to shower there that morning. I felt for a second that I was back in high school where there was this room with 4 showers and no curtains and people would just go shower there. I only showered there once, and it was because for some strange reason there was poop coming out of the drainage of the other showers…

Anyway, once you walk into the room with all the people naked there are plastic ’seats’ that are no taller than 1 foot and you just go sit on that. You shower by filling with water a bowl using the water faucets in front of you, and then there is shampoo and body wash on the side. There is also a mirror one or two feet above your head level at an angle that allows you to see yourself easily. Once you’re done with that, then you can go in to the ‘communal bath’, which is pretty much a big jacuzzi. It was quite hot, so must of us were out of there within 10-15 minutes.

After our magnificent bath (Japanese onzen) we we got on a bus and saw a few temples. We visited Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion), Daitokuji and Heianjingu before lunch. Then we visited the Kiyomizu Dera Temple and some other temples I can’t remember. Lunch this day was at a really nice Japanese restaurant, I’m sure it was the most expensive lunch I have had up to that point. I had a tempura set and it was delicious. Dinner was probably even more expensive that lunch — I had a sushi set that also included tempura and a few other things. Both lunch and dinner included either a bowl of rice or noddles, and even that was very delicious. The food was so delicious, and the best part is that it was all paid-for by MISTI-Japan so I didn’t have to spend my money on that.

During the temple visits I talked to about ~6 Japanese people who joined us in the trip. These folks were somehow associated with the people in charge of our tour (worked in their company, or university, or something similar) and they were there mostly to practice English. The flaw in this plan, however, was we the MIT students were there trying to speak as much Japanese as possible, so our interests were not really compatible with theirs.

Meru-san, Kim-san, Ben, and I spent most of the day with these two Japanese guys which were pretty much our age and were quite good at English. This allowed us to communicate fairly well cause they could throw in a few words in English when we were confused by what they were saying. They had a great spirit and were very friendly and interesting.

Our conversations flowed from talking about MIT, to talking about Japan, and all the usual things. Then we started learning kansai-ben, which is the dialect spoken in the ‘Kansai’ area. Something I learned is that, apparently, the reason why Japan has two areas, one called ‘Kansai’ and the other ‘Kanto’, is because Japan has a lot of mountains (which are non-developed areas), and there are two regions in which bigger cities have been built. Kansai and Kanto are those two regions.

We learned quite a bit of Kansai-ben that day, and would use it all the time to practice. I think we might have used it a bit in excess, but it was just too much fun. In return, we taught the Japanese how to say a few things like, “this is freaking awesome”, “this is tight”, “sweeeeet!”, and other similar phrases. It wasn’t a fair exchange cause they taught us more things, but they learned a few things and were quite good at using them. A pretty great thing was hearing them randomly say “oh my god, this is frlikin osom”.

Saturday after dinner we went to Karaoke! That was, pardon for the repetitiveness, freaking awesome! We went in a group of 8 people, 6 MIT kids and the 2 Japanese, and we were all pretty much on the same page. It was a very high energy group and we sang a wide range of music. We opened up with “Thriller” to commemorate Michael Jackson, and then sang music from Utada Hikaru, some other Japanese folks, Britney Spears, Aqua (Barbie Girl), Backstreet Boys, Muse, etc.

I must say that karaoke was amazing. I left the place with my throat feeling just the way it does before you either lose it or start speaking like a 60-year-smoker. In the morning I discovered that in my case it was the latter. I woke up and when I said hi I felt like I was about to give the news on the radio. JKim quickly let me know that even though I had such a deep voice, I was basically a girl in her eyes because I was telling her about all the face products that I’ve been using to keep my skin clean and almost acne-free. I could feel the love.

After karaoke Saturday night we returned to our hotel room at around 1am and just got ready for bed. The hotel room was actually quite nice and I found an ethernet cable that happened to give you free internet access. Of course I spent about an hour online.

After sleeping about 5 hours I woke up today at ~7am to get ready to go to more temples. We first took the train to Nara, which was just one station away from our hotel. Once there, we went to the Nara Koen park and walked through it to get to the Todaiji Temple which was amazing. We had a lecture by a Buddhist Monk about Buddhism and Shinto (the other main religion in Japan) and he told us a lot of things about the temple. There was enough wood in that temple to build 15,000 houses in Japan, and the temple was actually 1/3 of the size of the original temple. I looked at the temple in disbelief, it was enormous and I was being told that it was originally 3 times bigger!

After the lecture we were taken up to walk around the platform on which the Japan’s largest Buddha statue is on. Not many people get to go up there, so you could see a lot of people looking at us a bit puzzled by why all these foreigners were walking up to a restricted area. I was very grateful for the opportunity because it really allowed me to appreciate how big this statue was. To give you an idea, there is a big pole that has a hole made on it that is the size of the nostril in Buddha’s statue. Most MIT students in the tour were able to fit through the hole.

Once this was over we walked to a restaurant to eat Okonomiyaki! Before getting to the restaurant we fed some deers, which are actually all over the place in the temple surroundings. Those deers are quite smart, and when they see someone buying the little crackers/biscuits that you feed them with they surround you and are quite obnoxious about it! I recorded a video of someone being surrounded by them, which I uploaded to Facebook. :D

Here is a picture of us on the way to eat Okonomiyaki (we were too excited…)

After feeding the deers we had the lunch which was めっちゃ美味いわ, or ‘too delicious’ in Kansai-ben. After lunch we then returned all the way to Kyoto, and then I returned to Osaka with Meru-san, Ben, and Koji-san (one of the two Japanese guys we went to Karaoke with). Sadly, Naoki-san, which is the other Japanese guy, couldn’t join us on the second day of the trip because he had other things to work on. Both Koji-san and Naoki-san were extremely nice and made the whole experience a lot more fun than I would’ve imagined it to be. They both study in the Osaka area, so hopefully we can meet again sometime soon. We did talk about going karaoke again at some point in which Kim-san can hopefully come to Osaka (she’s in Tokyo for the summer) and Meru-san can come from Kobe (which is less than an hour away). I’m quite grateful for this weekend, and if we could all get together again I am sure it would be great. I think we might go see the fireworks together (which happen at different times all over Japan during the summer), so that should be fun too.

Overall, I think the best part of this weekend was the high-energy of the people I shared most of my time with. I was called by the Japanese “the high-energy one”, but I must admit I was particularly happy/excited this weekend because of the people I was with. We simply had a great time together while going through the day and I probably have more good memories about the 6ish of us joking around, having fun and doing karaoke than anything else.

I uploaded all my media to Facebook, and that’s about 200 pictures that you can find here :
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2087919&id=712370&l=89dcbfb048

Omar

Almost Kyoto Weekend!

Written: June 25, 2009 5:40pm

My week has been as exciting as it can be when you spend 12+ hours a day at work. I’ve done lots of research online during this time (on facebook, twitter, etc.) and have edited my essays for the HBS application maybe around 200 times. Actually, according to Open Office, this is how my essays are at this point:

Essay Number 1 (407 words), Edited 59 times, total editing time 4:18 hours
Essay Number 2 (400 words), Edited 126 times, total editing time 7:30 hours
Essay Number 3 (405 words), Edited 79 times, total editing time 6:42 hours
Essay Number 4 (669 words), Edited 93 times, total editing time 13:36 hours

I must point out that essays 1-3 should be 400 words long, and essay 4 should be 600 words long. This means that I have to cut down 81 words from here and there, which is why life is exciting during work hours. :) I’m currently waiting on some feedback from friends, and after I get that I will work on re-editing my essays more and more. I’ll keep polishing them, I find a certain satisfaction in doing so. It allows me to reflect on my life, my goals, and why I have such goals. The experience of writing this essays has, by itself, been such a grace that it makes the whole application process worth it already.

That being said, I had ramen from a different store the other night, it wasn’t as good as my usual bowl at Juso Ramen. Don’t get me wrong, it was delicious, but compared to Juso Ramen… maybe I’m just in love and can’t seem to find any flaws, but I simply love that freaking bowl of ramen. I can’t wait to go get it tomorrow.

That being said, this weekend I’m going to Kyoto! I’m joining 30 other MIT interns in Japan in a 2-day trip to Kyoto that will allow us to explore the old-capital. If you didn’t know, Kyoto used to be the capital of Japan, and that is why there are so many temples and beautiful things to see there. Back in the day, when Buddhism was introduced to Japan and Shinto was already in place, they coexisted in harmony, but each built as many temples as possible to establish their presence. Talk about passive-aggressiveness.

Anyway, I want to see a geisha. Not any geisha, the one from “Memoirs of Geisha”. Or Sei Shonagon. The only problem is that… yeah, exactly, they are nowhere to be found unless I move into the spiritual realm somehow.

Since we’re going to Kyoto this weekend my friend Carmel, who just graduated from MIT, is going to stay over at my apartment the night before! She is arriving tomorrow at 8pm-ish so guess what I’m planning? Guess where I want to take her to eat dinner… That’s right, when she gets off that train in Juso she will get out of the station, cross the street, and have dinner with me at Juso Ramen. And no, I did not consult with her about this, but yes, that’s how things work. If not, she can have dinner from the conbini after I’m done with my bowl of ramen. Just kidding, I would take her somewhere else for dinner!

So that is pretty much what has been going on in my life. Lots of internet browsing, lots of reading on the train while commuting, and that’s about it. I’m reading “A New Earth“, which I keep calling “A Whole New World”, and it’s an excellent book. Everyone should read it and see if they can be enlightened. After all, Oprah recommends it.

A Weekend of Essay Writing, and Going Out!

Written: Monday, June 22, 7:11 pm

Friday my work day was quite normal, except that by 8pm I decided that I was going home. As such, I was on the train back by 8:40ish and by 9:00pm I was back at Juso! I then proceeded to go to the Ramen shop across from the trains station, 十三ラーメン, and ordered one of their nice ramen bowls. The FREAKING BIG bowl with a LOT of pork, noodles, and a lot of other things was 820 yen! I was so happy eating that bowl, you have no idea. To give you an idea, that was my dinner Saturday and Sunday as well. I know, there are other things to eat in Japan, but every night as I thought of that delicious bowl of noodles I just couldn’t stop myself. Talk about self-control…

Anyway, Saturday I woke up at around 11ish and had lunch at the sushi place down the street where the sushi just goes around. It’s called Kaiten-Sushi (回転すし） literally rotating sushi. It was quite good. After lunch I just went back to my room and wrote and re-wrote my essays for the HBS 2+2 application. At around 9pm I decided that I was tired of rewriting essays and watching TV and headed to dinner (ramen).

I must say, though, that Japanese TV is quite interesting. I don’t know if the ~15 channels I get are representative of what people like to watch in Japan, but I’ve seen a couple of funny things. There’s 2 channels that are just there to sell you things, and these two women were talking about this ‘massager’ that would be perfect for your neck, the back of your EAR (yes… my ears are quite tense) and as she used it she would exclaim how good it felt. I don’t know if they were trying to kid anyone, but that was no massager. At least not for the body parts they were saying.

Anyway, something else that was quite interesting was watching Terminator in Japanese. All I could think the whole time was like: “There’s NO WAY that girl knows Japanese. And Arnold Schwarzenegger, he also doesn’t know Japanese, come on.” I thought it was funnier than anything else.

After going to dinner Saturday, at around 11pm, I headed to the train station to go to Umeda Station, where I was meeting a friend to go out to a bar. At around midnight we headed to the bar. Something I have to say is, in Japan you either go to bars early, and miss out the fun, or go at around midnight and stay all night. The trains stop running at around midnight, so what a lot of people do is go at midnight and take the first morning train back. And yes, that’s what I did. The first train back was at 5am. :s

So we went to the bar, and this is something about Japanese bars, they are probably twice as big as my apartment, and that’s not too big. You walk in and immediately everyone knows you’re there, and you know who is there. No mystery, and no way to hide. Anyway, I had a few drinks and met a couple of people. I actually met two people from Perú! Who would have thought, I came all around the world to Japan and I find Spanish-speaking people. It was nice to just speak Spanish when even in America I don’t get to speak it all that often.

At around 4:30am a few people I met, my friend, and I headed out to get some food. It was a good ‘after partying’ meal. It went on until about 5:45am, when we decided to head to the train station. It was funny to see all the people that were migrating to the train station at that time. You could see these girls/women wearing their fabulous dresses and with their make-up messed up. It was great. Also, according to my friend JKim, in Tokyo when she went out she saw that at around 5am one of the employees in one of the food places was waking up a bunch of people who had fallen asleep there while eating. Awesome, right?

I finally got home at around 6:30am and then showered and got to bed by 7am. Woke up at 1pm, had something from the ‘conbini’ and then edited my essays a bit more. After that I had dinner (ramen once again, they were good, believe me) and then at around 6pm I couldn’t wait any longer and fell asleep… I woke up at 11pm and then just went made a few calls (through Skype, of course) and got some midnight snack from the conbini. That conbini is so convenient, oh yeah, I wish we had those in all corners in Boston. They are pretty awesome. America should replace Dunkin Donuts by Mister Donuts, and 711 by Family Mart and Lawson.

Anyway, I finally went back to sleep at round 2am and woke up at 7:40am cause I had to be in lab by 9:15am. I got to lab by 9am, which was nice. In lab today I confirmed that no, I don’t understand scientific papers presented in Japanese, and yes, I am now the official mopper here. When it was time to clean the lab I basically just went and picked up the mop and started mopping, cause that’s what I do best.

I then did some cell passage, sent in my essays for criticism, and then went to lunch. Lunch was good, and cheap. I then prepared some samples for an SDS Page Gel, ran the gel and did silver staining on it. Now there is another beautiful gel on my post-doc’s lab notebook as proof of the hard work I do in lab. It’s actually the first time I do something useful in three weeks, I think.

Now I’m hungry, it’s 8:15pm, and I’m wondering if I should just go home and get dinner close to home. This might result in my dinner being ramen again, haha… we’ll see. :D

Okay, that’s my weekend report. There are probably a couple of things missing from my weekend reflections, but that’s alright. Next weekend is the Kyoto trip! That should be awesome.

-Omar

An Application Day

Written: Thursday, June 18, 2009 8:15pm

Yesterday I went home late at night after finishing some experiments and talking to people. I caught the last train home, which means I did not make it home until after midnight. I proceeded to sleep.

I woke up at 8:30 this morning and got ready as quickly as I could to make it to the 9:05am train. I was there two minutes early, which was good, but I did not have time to go to the grocery store to get my rice ball (onigiri) before going to work. That was unfortunate. Good thing, however, is that I had lunch with three other young students in the lab, and we all had a nice lunch at the Hospital Cafeteria. ‘masaya’-san, ‘boot’-san, ‘macho’-san and I all talked for about an hour and just enjoyed lunch together. It was nice to have lunch with them since I enjoy socializing with the people in my lab. They are all very interesting people, and very nice, just quite busy. Oh, something nice was that ‘Crazy’-san brought me a bottle of “Afternoon Tea (Milk Tea)” that she thought was better than the one I normally get. Also, Deng-san, who is one of the part-timers, gave me a piece of chocolate. :) I felt very loved.

In the afternoon I focused on finishing up my application for HBS’s 2+2 Program. The deadline is coming up soon (July 1st) and I have to finish working on the essays. Luckily the rest of the application is pretty much set, even the recommendation letters, but I’m still in the process of writing the essays, and there will definitely be a lot of re-writing and editing to do before I submit those. I hope to finish writing them by tomorrow, so I can edit them Saturday and then send them to a few people for feedback.

That being said, I’m quite tired now since all I’ve done this afternoon is work on essays. I’m planning to get dinner soon, and hopefully after that just go home. I’m sorry this day has not been too exciting, there is nothing new I can say to you. Oh wait, I haven’t mentioned this, in this building there are ALWAYS a LOT of people who come here to just check on inventory, check on lab machines, fix whatever is needed, replace filters, etc. These men all come dressed in suits and you can always see them in pairs, yes, only in pairs. They walk into rooms and replace something, they come talk to you if a machine you are using is making a weird noise, and most of the time, it seems, they just stand in every corner of the building. I think every time I go to the restroom during the day I see at least three or four pairs of them.

I think that’s quite interesting. I never used to see any of those in my lab. And my lab was also next to a building.

And my head hurts, I need to go eat now and rest at home. Have a nice day everyone!

Sleep and Work (June 16 & 17)

Written: June 17 at 8:51pm

I’ve been usually writing my updates in the afternoons of the next day about the previous day, and that doesn’t quite make sense when it comes down to remembering details. I am, now, writing my entries about the same day before going home. As such, this entry will include both yesterday and today.

My day was very normal. I can’t remember many special things about it, other than everything is special in the same way it was the first day at work. Everyone keeps being nice, I talk a lot of Japanese with fun people, and I miss my friends and family from Boston & home. What was different about yesterday was that I went home early! :D

I went home much earlier than usual. I went to get dinner by 7:30pm, and then just went home so I as home by 9:30pm. I stopped at Mister Donuts to have, well, a donut, and realized that having a donut there at night makes me save money. Here is the reason, a donut there costs about 105 yen (that’s what mine cost me last night) and it includes FREE WATER if you stay in to eat it. With a donut I am more satisfied about my dinner (so I am not tempted to buy an onigiri (a 105 yen rice ball) at lawson), and because I have free water I have no need to buy a drink either (~150 yen), so there you go, I saved 150 yen and sat at Mister Donut for a while. I decided that if I was thirsty when I got home (and if it was before 11pm) I would go to Mister Donuts and eat a donut instead of buying a drink at the vending machines or lawson.

I also noticed something else, Japanese men, as in grown-up men wearing suits which are probably in their 30’s, play PSP against each other at Mister Donuts. It was funny to sit there and just notice that someone next to me was too excited about their PSP game, and it was quite a shock when I actually looked and saw that it was two grown-up men playing PSP. I thought I had entered a different dimension in which it was normal to care more about winning a PSP battle than getting home or actually talking to your friend sitting next to you.

That being said, after eating my donut I ran home, and there I bathed, shaved, and went to bed. I slept over 10 hours! :D I didn’t wake up until 8:30am, and I had gone to bed by 10:30 I’m quite sure. It was so nice to just wake up and feel energetic. Well, actually, I was quite tired for some unknown reason and couldn’t just wake up, but after a bit of a fight with my comforter I got up and felt good.

Today I came to work and I have actually been working most of the day. Usually I have long periods of times in which I’m doing nothing, and usually after 5-6pm I do absolutely nothing but my own things or talk to people. But even now, as I write this at 9pm, I’m staining an SDS gel. It’s been a busy day. It seems that even though I didn’t plan on it, it was quite a good plan to sleep so long last night.

There are a few other things I’ve noticed in Japan that I don’t think I’ve mentioned. First, I think that my face and my presence reminds Japanese kids of their homework, particularly their English homework. I’ve been able to experience how some Japanese kids that sit next to me or across from me, soon after looking at me with a face that reads something like: “Where is this gaijin (foreigner) from?!”, they reach for their bags and take out their English homework. I think it’s their own way of saying “I’m making an effort to understand your people.” Maybe they just want me to do their homework for them, but I never talk to them.

Another thing, as I was walking home yesterday I past by this old lady and she just stopped, right there, on the sidewalk where there was nowhere to go, and she just kind of looked up the rest of the path, as if wondering if it was worth it to keep walking, and then after a long pause she kept walking. I wondered for a second what was the motivation behind that little ‘break’ right in the middle of nowhere, it was kind of odd. Maybe she just stopped to re-calculate the number of gaijin she had seen in her life, I’m probably one of the first 10.

Anyway, lastly, something that I’ve found awesome is just walking down the street and hearing on the random radios by the stores music I like such as Lady Gaga (yeah!), Beyoncé, Jason Mraz, and even some Mariachis! I think it’s great. Also, my supervisor finds it extremely weird, as in incomprehensible, that I talk to my mother almost every day. Over lunch he kept saying things like “Every day?! What is there to talk about?” I think it must be really difficult for him to understand this cause as he says most people here in Japan talk to their parents only a few times a year (once every couple of months) once they leave their parents’ house. Now if I do that, that would be unforgivable to my mother.

So that is my update for yesterday and today, it’s not 9:20pm so I’m going to see how’s the gel doing and see if I can head home soon.

Thank you very much for reading. :)
御丸

Monday was normal, until I saw cops!

Written: Tuesday, June 16, 2009

I woke up and got to work a bit late (at 9:20am, the seminar started at 9:15am). It was okay, though, no big problem. After the seminar (in which three papers were presented) was our Monday lab cleanup. You can tell that people liked how I mopped last week cause when I showed up they were like “Can you mop?!” and I was like… sure!

So I went and mopped again, and randomly people would come and say “It’s very clean, very pretty.” I mopped with all the energy I had, and again thought about all the years of training I’ve had mopping. Master mopper you can call me, at least that’s how they think about me here I’m guessing.

Anyway, after mopping, etc, I went to check my cells and discovered that there was a huge contaminant in them. After crying for many many seconds, I looked at it under the microscope and then, since there was nothing that I could do to save the cells, I bleached it all and threw it away. There went my cells, I though. Now, do you remember how last week there were some cells that I thought I had killed? It so happens that I looked at them under the microscope and it seems like a few cells remained alive and after a week of incubating there were many more cells in the plate! I was so excited.

After my cell frustration and re-enlightenment I went on with my life and used the internet for a while. I was finally able to check facebook, post pictures, update this blog, etc. Then I made a few solutions for my experiment and put some cells in some media to incubate overnight. That was the summary of my day, pretty much.

At night I talked to “Señor Potto Sensei” (nicknamed by me, of course) and we went to dinner together. By going to dinner together I mean, we walked downstairs to the convenience store together and bough microwaveable dinner sets and ate it together in the seminar room. We had a total of 20 minutes to do this before Señor Potto Sensei had to go back to check on his experiment. So we had dinner and talked, and then I went, talked to Crazy-san and Masaya-san for a while, and headed back home. I took the train at 9:48pm, which is the earliest I’ve headed home in over a week! :)

I thought, mm… now I’ll go home and sleep, but I think there is a masochist part of me that always finds a way for me to stay up until late. So instead of just going to bed, when I got to the Juso Station I walked to the free internet spot I found and called my mom. After talking to her for almost an hour, then I called my grandmas (both of them) and talked to my granddad and an uncle. It was after midnight when I finished talking to all these people. I then headed home. Entering my apartment I saw two cops, and I was like, OH! I was so surprised I almost ran to see what was happening. Turns out, there was a Japanese girl and a white kid involved. The number of foreigners in Osaka probably accounts for less than .001% of the population, and somehow, when there are cops interfering on something, there is one involved. Oh well… represent!

So I went into my apartment and I could hear the cops talking, communicating through their radio device thing, and I could hear the Japanese girl talking and talking and talking. It was like she could not shut up. Then, after a while, the cops left and the girl and the white boy started arguing about something. I don’t know what it was, but I know they were talking in Japanese and the white guy had a peculiar accent, which was funny. What was not funny, however, was that I could not sleep and it was after 2am. I ended up shutting down the window and sliding door to my room and turning on the A/C. Then I slept like a baby.

That was the end of my day. Interesting, huh? Lovely…

My Weekend Update (June 12-14)

Written: June 15, 12:27pm

I haven’t written an update on my life since last Friday morning! What a shame. I should definitely keep making it a point to reflect on my experience on a daily basis. That being said, here is my weekend update.

Friday I pretty much stayed at work until late at night, and then headed back home. I had dinner at home, dinner I bought at the convenience store, and then went to sleep. It was a very low key, nice day. If there were any exciting events this day, I can’t remember now, one important reason to write every day.

Saturday I slept-in and woke up at around 10am, I did laundry and cleaned up the apartment. One of the benefits of Japanese-sized (i.e. small) apartments is that you can vacuum them completely in less than 20 minutes. It was great. After doing laundry and cleaning up the apartment I decided that I wouldn’t spend the entire day at home, so I ventured out to Umeda Station (Osaka) and then walked around the streets there. It was great to just walk around and see the nightlife starting out and developing. It’s quite a lively area at night there. I was tempted to just stay there all night and take a train home in the morning (as many people do) but I had quite an interesting day coming up and I needed to get a good night’s sleep.

For dinner Saturday I had the magnificent experience of having an Okonomiyaki! I must say, that was one tasty meal. Okonomiyaki is known to be a specialty of Osaka, so I wanted to try it for a while now. While exploring the Umeda Station area I walked across this place that was called something that started with “O”, I took out my iPhone and typed “Okonomiyaki” in the Japanese keyboard to see how I would write it using Chinese characters too (in Kanji) and what came out was “お好み焼き” which was how the store name started! I walked in, excited, and asked for a ‘deluxe’ okonomiyaki. When I had that one Okonomiyaki I thought I was tasting something made in heaven. So delicious! You can see a picture of my halfway done Okonomiyaki on my facebook pictures posted here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2086637&id=712370&l=9f88aaa6d8

That was the highlight of my Saturday. Sunday I woke up at ~9:00am and took the 10:00am train in the Kobe direction. I was fortunate enough to experience a Japanese Tea Ceremony, which was quite interesting. A very unique ceremony, and it was quite crowded. There were two ceremonies performed before I could actually take part of one because they have a limit of 25 people per ceremony, and there were many more people there. Women were walking around in their kimonos which were beautiful, and I (and the other men in the room) were wearing suits. Women that did not own a kimono were wearing very pretty dresses.

After the tea ceremony I went to Kobe and visited a few mansions (European style) and saw a lot of great things. I would go into detail explaining what I saw, but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and I have over 100 pictures uploaded to facebook for your enjoyment. I wouldn’t want to write 1000 words for each picture, imagine that.

Just to reiterate, the link to the pictures is here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2086637&id=712370&l=9f88aaa6d8

Please take a look!

If not through science, contribute in some other way

Thursday, June 11, 2009 – 7:09pm

Today I also came in to lab at around 10:30am, a bit later than I wanted, so I’m aiming to go home early and be in tomorrow by 9am. In lab I did a few things and then sent the associate professor an e-mail with the notes I took yesterday at the conference about how to publish to nature. I wrote the e-mail in Japanese and then re-wrote it in *English* to make sure I didn’t mess up.

A bit later the professor checked his e-mail and called me up and he said it was great and thanked me a lot. I felt good! It’s kind of like, if I don’t do much in lab in terms of experiments, I try to help out in other ways. The professor sent my notes to the entire lab and told them to review the notes and to save them. Then he encouraged everyone to publish to Nature. It was nice. He also told everyone to thank me… :$

The professor was also impressed by my Kanji name (Japanese name written with Chinese characters) and he told me “That’s great! You should have cards with your name in Japanese!” It would have looked very Japanese but my last name can’t really be written with Chinese characters in Japanese, there’s not a good sound for Fe in Kanji.

A bit later someone threw a paper on my desk and when I look it had my name printed on it using Kanji and Katakana. It said “フェルナンデス御丸” which is my name, printed in different colors 4 times! I was like, what? When I looked back it was the professor! Haha, I just started laughing and then everyone in the lab looked at it and they were asking me questions like “that’s your name? OH SUGOIIIII (awesome).” Apparently Masato-kun chose a really good Kanji name for me!

Here is a picture of the paper:

When Prof. Murakami found out I had a Kanji name he thought it was awesome and printed this out.

Anyway, after that I just went out to lunch and had Tonkatsu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tonkatsu_set_by_zezebono_in_Sapporo,_Hokkaido.jpg) for ~$4.50. So good. Then I came back to lab and just prepared a few solutions, ran an SDS gel with my post-doc after purifying a protein, and that’s about it. I want to go home soon, or go to dinner with labmates, one of those two, so we’ll see how that goes.

Update: (9pm)
I went to dinner with one of my lab friends, the youngest one in the lab (’masaya-san’), and we had a chicken dinner set. It was delicious. I keep being impressed by the food here in Japan! We had a nice dinner conversation and after that came back to the lab. Now I’m planning to go home soon since I don’t want to be trapped again the game of staying in too long and not having time to sleep! Tonight I’m going home and sleeping~ I also need to take care of a few things… such as laundry… but that can wait until Saturday. I don’t think I’ll be coming in to lab on Saturday since I was told it was okay for me to stay home, but I just feel bad knowing that everyone else comes in, and has to get work done, while I’ll be sleeping at home and discovering new things on my own. After all, they are so nice and friendly.

Average Hours Spent at Lab per Day ~11

Average Hours Spent working: about half of that.
The rest of the time? Socializing and using the internet. Talking to JKim online, too, cause she’s not that busy looking at birds’ brains.

Written June 10, 2009 at 9:08pm

I’m still in lab considering going home soon, but I’m waiting until my mom wakes up in Puerto Rico (it’s now 8am there) so I can call her through Skype. You have to keep in mind, folks, that I only have internet access at work or by paying at the internet café. I can find random wireless connections that are not protected, but those I can only use if the signal is strong enough, and my laptop’s battery only lasts for less than an hour before it runs out. The other option I have is to use a random internet connection that I found behind my apartment and talk through Skype on my iPhone, but the only problem I have with that is that sometimes the connection is weak and the call can drop.

That being said, today was a good day. I got to lab at around 10:30am because I was tired and slept a bit longer in the morning. Then, at around 11:30am, ‘Crazy’-San came over and asked me if I was ready for lunch. At around 12pm we headed in a group to lunch. The group was ‘King’-san, ‘Crazy’-san, ‘Boot’-san, ‘Masaya’-san, and me. Remember that most of their nicknames were created or decided by me.

Anyway, we had lunch and Crazy-san actually paid for my lunch. I thought that was really sweet of her. It was a welcoming lunch, I’ve had my lunch paid for by others twice since I got to Japan! The lunch was delicious, and as usual cheap. We talked a lot and I got many things explained to me in English or in Japanese, and I explained many things to them too. They are interested in practicing and learning English, which is fun. They are all so nice, I like them a lot.

In the afternoon, at around 4pm, we headed down to a lecture room to have a presentation on “How to publish to Nature Journal” by the Executive Editor. It was a nice talk, and I took a lot of notes cause I knew many of the Japanese researchers would be reading the slides and not really understanding what she was saying. I took many notes and copied them to my computer so they can read them. At around 7:30pm I asked ‘crazy’-san if she had eaten dinner already, and she hadn’t, so we made a small group and had dinner together. This time ‘King’-san and ‘Masaya’-san couldn’t join us cause they were busy, but ‘Macho’-san joined us. That nickname, Macho-san, I didn’t make up. ‘Crazy’-san made it up. For dinner we all headed down to the convenience store and bought little meals and had that for dinner in the seminar room. It was all good, and we talked a lot and made fun of each other, especially of ‘Crazy’-san.

Some other things I’ve noticed of Japanese people, they sleep a lot on their train ride home, and many people take naps in lab cause we’re here 12+ hours a day. Also, the slot machines and arcades are open since 9:30am, which I find weird. The Japanese are fun, I like them, and they ask me a lot of questions. They also seem quite interested in knowing more about the things I do, etc. They are easily surprised by people who can speak Japanese.

Also, they have a lot of delicious drinks in their vending machines. Yesterday night I tried cold tea with milk and it was really good. I am getting another one of those on my way back home tonight, for sure. :)

Oh, and the board with magnets that we use to indicate if we’re in lab or not is organized by seniority. I go above the secretary according to that board. She is, however, obviously much more important and respected than what the board says, after all she’s been in this lab since it started pretty much.

Update: I went home at around 10:00pm and called my mom at around 10:45pm through Skype on my iPhone. After that instead of going to bed I talked to Sharps-san from MIT until 1am and then went to bed. Great, right? :)