Lab Summer Trip: Part 1

I spent the last 3 days on a trip with the other students in my lab and the students from the other geotech lab at another campus. It was a fruitful 3 days and I really enjoyed getting out of Tokyo and seeing more of Japan.

Not everyone from both labs went and my two friends Ivan and Wayway weren't going, so I wasn't sure what to expect since I had had limited interaction with the Japanese students and I was going to have to room with four other guys for the trip. Luckily one of them was Carlos, who sits next to me in the lab and is from Colombia, was going and he knew the other guys. Basically the rooms got separated between English speakers (ie. non-Japanese) and the Japanese. It made sense since Japanese are all friends and the basically by default the non-Japanese are friends.

Going into the trip, I hoped that I could become better friends with the two guys who arrived earlier this week from Italy. Like me, they are only in Tokyo for the summer and seemed like nice enough guys.

We met at the lab on Wednesday morning at 6:45am and got on a coach bus. Our first destination was Niigata because there had been a major earthquake there in 1964 and we were going to see some historical sites. As it turns out, in the subsequent 50 years they had rebuilt the areas that were damaged (what a surprise), but we did see some interesting things.

Riding on the bus was an interesting enough experience. I think we stopped at every rest stop that we past. It seemed like every hour we were stopping again. At the first rest stop, I should have known that the bathrooms would be nice because there was a guy dusting the light fixtures on the outside of the building. Sadly I had left my camera in my bag that day, so it spent the day in the luggage hold of the bus and I spent the day without it. I more than made up for it on Thursday.

During the course of the day, I was availed upon to settle questions of English words for things. Like the English word for a dragon fly. I amazed them when they asked me the word for hypnotist. I told them what it was and then also explained about the verb hypnotize and the subject hypnotism. This was far too much for them and they assured me they would quickly forget such complicated things.

Wednesday night we got to the hotel and my suspicions were confirmed. It was a ski resort, literally on the slopes. I hadn't been sure what other type of hotel would rent rooms big enough for 5 people in the mountains in Japan. The room only had 2 beds, but there was an area about 6 Tatami mats and some futons for you to sleep on. I somehow ended up with a bed. I'm guessing they were being nice to be because I'm a visitor. Also, throw away your conception of what a futon is and replace it with fairly thick, roll up mattress.

Choco (more like cho ko, than chocolate), one of my roommates for the trip taught us a card game and we spent the time before dinner playing cards and trading off taking showers. There was also a party that night for everyone to socialize at. We had a big private room and drink and snacks were provided. Again, the room was fairly segregated in Japanese and foreigners, since we were sitting at 2 different tables. The Japanese girls were always more willing to sit and talk to the foreigners, but the guys were more interested in hanging out with each other.

I also got to talk a bit more with Stefano (Steve) and Matteo. We sort of talked about drinking for a bit. They taught me an Italian toast, which is roughly equivalent to "chug." It means "drink until the glass is empty." I'm a bit disappointed that in all the years that the English language has existed, we haven't come up with anything better than "chug," at least not that I'm aware of. The rest of the night went pretty well and we all headed to bed around midnight.

Evening came, morning followed.