I'm here... with no internet

Just a quick update while I borrow a fellow Shirasagi resident's internet.

I landed successfully, everything's awesome, I can't wait to begin going into detail about everything I've done so far, the pictures I've taken, and the people I've met. I'll be getting a phone and internet contract tomorrow (hopefully), so I'll be able to write more then.

Until then, I'll be staying genki (full of good energy) here in Himeji!

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Autumn Leaves and Castle Cats

Here's a bunch of long overdue photos from the last two weeks! The autumn leaves have been absolutely stunning! The mountainsides are turning all sorts of colors, which makes them even more stunning than usual. I did my best to photograph the one that you can see from Shirasagi's garden, which is right outside of my apartment. The leaves are finally starting to fall from most of the trees these days, but the colors were beautiful while they lasted! Below are a bunch of photos of the bike paths next to the Himeji Castle Moat, which were surrounded by trees in stunning shades of red and gold. This is definitely the scenic route to get to downtown in Himeji! Unfortunately, I'm still not quite sure of all of the twists and turns through neighborhoods that it involves to get to the back entrance of this pathway, but once I'm on it I can orient myself via the castle. This area is always full of joggers, bikers, and... cats. Stray cats, for t...

Scarecrows and Swordsmen Make for an Exciting Weekend!

This weekend I had two consecutive day trips! On Saturday, November 9th, I went to Aioi to watch a swordsmith make a katana and viewed the Scarecrow Festival; I also went on a bit of a hike, and visited an art museum! Aioi was about an hour away from Shirasagi by car. It was at a higher altitude, so it was a bit chilly in the morning. Once the sun came out, though, it got much more comfortable! The autumn leaves were absolutely stunning; there's nothing quite like seeing mountainsides dotted with colorful trees! The entrance to a main area of Aioi. The view from the window of the smithy. The swordsmith at work! He was a junior apprentice, which meant he had to do all the work himself, using this machine to pound the steel. Apparently the grand masters are allowed to have apprentices pound the steel manually for them. A pond outside the smithy! A watermill fed into it. An ivy-covered house! Starting a hike to view a shrine in ...

SPring-8 and Warm Weather!

I was able to tour the synchotron radiation facility, SPring-8 , and it was pretty neat! It was also very very crowded--they only open the facility to visitors for a very short window, and on the day I went they were expecting crowds of over 5,000 people! The facility was gigantic, especially the ring which launches electrons to (almost) the speed of light; as far as appearance goes, though, it was mostly just lots of heavy machinery, and really didn't look that much different from laboratories in the US. The facility itself was pretty neat though, and despite my limited knowledge of applied physics I was able to get the gist of how most of the machines worked in this particular lab. It's reminiscent of an electron collider (like the ones that lead to the discovery of the Higgs Boson recently), except that they don't smash the atoms, they only speed them up to extreme speeds. The electrons move on a curved circuit--aka, a ring--and the curves are important as this a...

Daley-sensei's Adventures in Himeji, Japan.

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