In Tsukuba

Yesterday was or today is my birthday (depending which side of the date line you're on... it's no longer my birthday here). It's probably only the second I've celebrated with daid, and it's definitely the first I've celebrated at a conference and away from most of the people I know (which made it a little hard in some respects). However, we went out at the end of the day yesterday and had a lot of fun, so it was pretty good overall.

We started the day poorly, by getting totally lost on the way to the conference though. We barely missed the train (the doors were shutting as we got to the top of the stairs) and since the next train was 20 minutes away and we estimated the conference centre to be a 30 minute walk (compared to 20 minutes waiting for the train + 3 minutes on the train + 10 minutes walking from the train station to the conference) we figured it would be reasonable to walk there. Unfortunately, the roads in between were small and winding and we walked for 45 minutes before finding the conference centre.

We took the train (well, really three trains) to Tsukuba Sunday evening and it seems to be quite nice so far. Tsukuba is a planned city which was designed with the goal of accelerating scientific research, so there's a lot of research that happens here (daid has been here for several experiments, though less since the big earthquake destroyed one of the accelerators) and even the manhole covers are appropriately themed with depictions of space shuttles and Saturn, which is pretty awesome. Interestingly, the city's name is typically written in hiragana (as つくば) instead of kanji (Chinese characters), which means that I can actually read its name instead of memorizing the symbols (which is more common since kanji is the traditional way to represent city names).

It's also surrounded by mountains, which is awesome because mountains on the horizon make for a gorgeous city.