Getting Ready for Korea and Canada

I've been busy and tired this weekend. While on internship, I was sleeping about 6~7 hours a day and getting by pretty fine on that. Weekend, I would be sleeping just as much, seemed like one of my dreams on cutting back on sleep was coming into effect. It didn't last by the time I got home.

Friday, the afternoon I arrived back into Sendai after a 200 km trip by bullet train back from Utsunomiya. I b-line'd back home dropped off my stuff unpacked and left immediately to lab to start working on a presentation I would give the next day. One of those scheduled lab presentation things where I would present 3 months worth of work and what I have been doing to everyone. Fortunately I had all 39 slides ready before I left and about 1/3 of my presention hand outs completed before I left for my internship. I started working at about 7:00 pm and worked till midnight to finish my handouts, had them printed and finished by mindnight. By lab standards, got my work done pretty fast-- it is not unusual for people to sleep over at lab preparing for their presentations. One of the 3 presenters did exactly that.

I gave my presentation the next day, updating everyone on my recent results, which were a mixed bag. Some good and some not good. Some techniques worked and some don't so well.. it's important to not let your pride get tangled with the results of experiments. Experiments are exactly that, you don't know what the outcome is going to be... if something works, it works, if it fails then it fails. What it has to do with you is nothing, the reason you are doing this is to figure things out. After spending 1.5 years here and watching everyone trying to say that they are doing a good job on their research or hiding things that didn't work, I got fed up-- there is nothing wrong with saying so.

I did my presentation that day and made absoultely clear of the things that did not work for me, I was blunt and even told them it could be poor handling or whatever and asked the audience directly if I was doing anything wrong or if anything could be improved. Maybe it will encourage these people to speak out more and not take things so hard if the professors rap on them a little. Didn't learn something right? Got advice from people and learned something new? Great! That's all you need.

My presentaiton was energetic and interactive, I was glad that nearly everyone was awake during my presentaiton. There was one guy that fell asleep and drooled over his shirt and we had a good chuckle out of that.

Got home after the presentation that day, crashed a little and went out for dinner with friends I promised to see right after getting back into Sendai.

The next day, met up with another friend from a volunteer group who is always gracious to invite me out to all sorts of events for lunch and got people together for a hotpot that evening that went till 2 am.

The next day, I would have to get my internship report done, do some shopping and get a lonely planet guide to Korea. I just finished all that and then mostly finished packing. It is 3 am and I am bushed. Just checked that I can have one carry on and one personal piece of luggage. Going to have an oversized shoulder bag and a backpack that I am going to bring.

Well, tomorrow I get up at 9:00 am. Hit the University to sign some documents then hit the bullet train out of here to Narita Airport then off to Korea I go. If I have net connection, I'll keep you people posted.

Bon Voyage to me!