By the way my name is Chris in case any of you were wondering and I am in Japan to do research through the Toxicology department of ERHS and Dr. Hanneman’s lab. I am here with 3 of my peers who SHOULD be blogging too and 3 people from Dr. Nickoloff’s lab. I hope you enjoy the stories.
So I slept for 11 hours my first night here and believe it or not it wasn’t enough, guess I undersestimated how tired I’d be after my first trip abroad. Breakfast consisted of the yogurt and frosted flakes we bought at Aeon last night. By the way, all portions in Japan are much smaller, much smaller. After breakfast we all met and went to the lab for a meeting. Turns out the meeting is tomorrow instead so Team B (the three of us who came to Japan a week later) watched a radiation training video (snoresville). Oh, when we got to the lab we also met most of the people working in our lab and watched a video. It was the son of one of the ladies in the lab and his water polo team had choreographed a synchronized swimming “dance” (?) I know it sounds odd but it was very funny.
Then it was time for lunch. I feel like a lot of my posts will discuss my meals because they are sooo good. There is a cafeteria on campus and to order you put money i a vending machine, press a button, a ticket pops out and you hand it to the chefs. Most of the time the choices are written in Japanese so it can be a bit of gamble but there is usually pictures to accompany the choices. Today we had miso flavored ramen and it was absolutely delicious. Plus it’s good manners to slurp your ramen so that’s a bonus!
After that we went on a tour of the HIMAC facility and the medical center on the NIRS campus. A HUGE shoutout to Mr. Motoki Kumagai, Ms. Yuka Matsuzaki, Mr. Yasuhisa Fujibayashi, and Mr. Hiroshi Ishihara who presented different areas of the facilities to us. All of the technicians, scientists, professors, etc have been incredibly kind and helpful to us. All of these presenters were prepared and excited to teach us today and they were all very prepared. I must say that the facilities are absolutely beautiful and state of the art and everyone very courteous and knowledgeable. All the machines are state of the art and anyone would be lucky to be treated for cancer here. Again I will try to upload pictures.
After the tour we spent the rest of the afternoon working in lab and then it was time for dinner. Dr. Fujimori took us out to a local restaurant. It was funny because when he asked if another man wanted to join us he just said “what? that’s just a bar!” and we all laughed. Again the food was very good we even got to eat Mt. Fuji! After dinner we made a quick trip to Aeon for some snacks and then went back to the lab. We worked in the lab from about 10pm to 12:30 am plating our cells and getting prepared for our first beam time tomorrow. Because all of our beam times are in the middle of the night I think that we are going to be doing the majority of our work late at night, a blessing and a curse.
Also when we were walking to and from lab tonight it was raining very hard. Surprise there is a typhoon coming in tomorrow! Yay Japan is just full of surprises. S far all of them have been good. Lissa is borrowing the cord for my camera so I will try to upload pics ASAP. Peace
