Soba making, JAXA visit and more!

The conference I attended last week was fun, interesting and a little tiring (basically, how conferences are generally).  Since we had to eat out all week, we had some issues ordering food that wasn't full of meat (or with secret hidden meats), but we managed to do it. We also had a chance to impart some advice about vegetarian foods found at combinis (convenience stores) to another vegetarian we met at the conference who recently moved to Japan.*

On Friday, we went on the conference excursion which consisted of going to a cooking school where we learned to make soba noodles which was a lot of work, but not too difficult (just a little tricky at times). While we made noodles, others in our group made pizza dough then we had to go roll out our dough (which the instructors insisted on getting us to use rolling pins for), add sauce, toppings (corn was included among them because this is Japan) and cheese. I tried to add cheese before the toppings and was told this was incorrect. I acknowledged my "error" and was going to wait until the instructor went away to do it that way anyway, but he stood there until I'd put my toppings on and had nothing to add after the cheese. daid simply dumped all of his cheese onto his pizza before anyone could "correct" him.

Either way, the pizza was good, then we got to have some cold soba. For cold soba, the noodles are cooked, then chilled and served with a dipping sauce that contains dashi, soy sauce and mirin called tsuyu. You can add wasabi and scallions to this sauce if you like it that way and when you're out of noodles, you can also add some of the water the noodles were cooked in (sobayu) to make a hot drink.

After lunch, we went to JAXA's Tsukuba Space Center where we got to look at rockets and walk around inside a life-sized model of Japan's contribution to the International Space Station (ISS) which is a laboratory called Kibo which means hope. As well, there were some models of Kounotori which is being used to resupply the ISS and we got to hear all about it, as well as the rockets being used to carry it up. 

After the planned activities were done for the day, daid and I wandered up to the University of Tsukuba where we admired the leaves that were turning colours as well as the campus. The campus is pretty hilly and there is sort of a floating sidewalk that runs through much of the campus connecting some of the hills (so you don't have to walk up and down a lot) and cars can drive underneath (so you also don't have to mix your cars with your pedestrians).

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On Saturday, we met up with one of daid's friends and drove out to the Ushiku Daibutsu (where dai = big and butsu = Buddha) which is the tallest statue in the world (according to Guinness). We went inside the daibutsu and looked around, then went to part of the petting zoo and pet some rabbits and guinea pigs, then we went off to a football (soccer) game.

We went to see the Kashima Antlers play, but we arrived at the stadium a bit late. This meant that as we were walking up to the stadium, we got a taste of how loud the fans were. We could hear them from at least 500 m down the street and when we got into the stadium, we found that most of the noise was coming from just the fans behind one of the goals.

It was something I've never seen before. I've been to see professional sports and I've seen some coordinated cheering, but this was a whole new level. First of all, it was coordinated cheering that went on for the entire game. Secondly, there were people who brought drums with them (which probably helped keep it so coordinated really) and there were other fans who brought really large flags to distract the other team when they took penalty kicks and the like. People at that end of the field seemed to spend the entire game on their feet jumping up and down and singing.

Unfortunately, they lost, but it was still a good match.

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*For reference, the mainstays of vegetarian food available in combinis consists of ume (pickled plum) onigiri (rice balls, sometimes wrapped in nori), kombu (seaweed cooked in some sauce) onigiri, wakame (a different seaweed) onigiri, shiso (a leaf related to basil used to flavour ume during the pickling process) and red bean onigiri and egg salad sandwiches. Sometimes there is also kimpira and inari sushi or some pastas (which the clerks will heat up for you) and the usual things like chips (minus the shrimp or whatever seafood flavoured ones).

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.