Welcoming Party

19/10/07

Here you can find quite some nice and pretty little flowers along the way. the leaves are also special and very nice to me, and you can notice the colours are starting to change already. I'll put some more photos here later. :)

Prof told us that Japan had a very long and hot summer this year, which it’s up to 40oC! The weather is changing due to the global warming effect. the autumn this year is about 2-3 weeks late, so everything pushes backward. then I wonder if we can watch the sakura and cherry blossoms before we leave Japan or not.

Tonight we had a welcoming party at Prof Okuda’s apartment, which is about 20minutes walking distance from the lab. They already put it on the notice board in lab. We walked there with one associate professor, and another guy in the lab. Together in the party are Alvin's lab mates.

It’s a really enjoyable night, we had the BBQ using electronic BBQ hot plate. One of the guys brought a huge box of meat, which we finish not even half of it I think. we have quite a few types of beef, and some ‘weird’ parts of the animals, e.g. beef tongue (Prof Okuda said it’s very expensive stuff), intestines, (thanks kim!) chicken neck. When we look at the price, my chin wanna drop to the ground already... that's few hundreds ringgit there!

This is the first unhealthy meal we had in Japan.. Though it started off with only a small piece of butter, but then most of the meat is full of fat, making everything also becomes oily.












You see that round pieces of meat? That's the beef tongue, nothing much special, just that i think it's a bit hard to bite.

Then the long pieces ones are the chicken's neck without the bones. I think that's very fat and... The thought of it's a chicken's neck makes me feel a bit disgusting. But still acceptable lar.


This is Prof Okuda. I think he's handsome. :)



There’s also quite some vege, mushrooms, but after barbequing them, everything is oily. They also have this sweet potato rice, and pumpkin salad, which is very nice.



Japanese really drink lots of wine. Prof Okuda gave us tried two types of rice wine (sake), sparkling wine, beer and red wine. But too bad, I really don’t enjoy those.




I had a nice girls’ talk with the 3 girls who are also Prof Okuda’s postgraduate students, from left is Yamasaki Nozomi (she's very particular about 'Nozomi' ;p), Yuko and Hatae. It’s hard to remember their name, so I record in my hp. There are 3 guys + a professor associate, who left earlier, I didn’t talk much with them though. the 3 girls actually are only 22 or 23 years old. We have difficulties in communication, as they often take few minutes to express in English and I take time to understand what they are trying to say also. but they are very nice and funny, I like them :)

We took a 35-40minutes walk back to our apartment from Prof’s place, it’s really freezing cold! And who say we will lose weight here? I don’t think so!