Starting Work in Japan and Food

We were to meet up with Yoshi at the university late in the morning since he had a lecture to give early that morning.  We then met up to ride the bus.  It was easy enough to locate the bus stop and we immediately found one of the buses we could ride was waiting there.  We had bought a bus pass that had a fixed sum of money on the card and we used it for the bus fare.  You insert the card when you get on to set a starting point for determining your bus fare.  You also enter the bus at the middle.  We selected the correct location to get off and had to insert the ticket again at the front of the bus and it automatically deducted the bus fare from our passes.  The day was just fine as we talked about experiments that had been done on the key samples that we were trying to evaluate and we made plans for experiments to do while we were there.  Here is my lunch from the cafeteria on the campus.  It was a breaded pork, rice bowl with seaweed on top (quite good actually).

We also bought tickets for a professional baseball game that we’ll attend on Friday 6/11.  It was overcast the entire day.  It’s not so hot here temperature wise but the humidity is very high so it often feels very muggy and it’s easy to start sweating.  I have also noticed that most Japanese people do not wear hats even when it is sunny and most also dress fairly nice, typically with button up white collared shirts and dress pants.  Rarely do you see people wearing jeans, which I almost always wear.  It’s also assumed that you WILL wear socks with sandals and it won’t be a faux pox!  You must wear slippers in people’s homes and in offices and lab spaces.  Each of these places will have some extra sandals for you to put on.  You are to stand in a certain place while you wear your outside shoes.  

There are even bathroom slippers, just for the bathroom, that are different than the rest.

After work Yoshi took us to a shrine site to see the nice view of Sendai.  Shrines correspond to the Shinto religion and temples correspond to the Buddhist religion, perhaps the two common religions in Japan (religion isn't so common for most people here though).  The shrine gates were closed but here's a photo from a distance.

After the shrine visit Yoshi took us to a volcano ramen place.  I took video while Yoshi was driving (I was sitting in the front left seat, normally the driver's seat in American cars, but Japanese drive on the left side of the road).

Here's the volcano ramen with video of when they bring it to your table and pour in the boiling water to cook your food right in front of you.  It was fun to watch and was quite tasty.  These kinds of meals cost around $10, so not so bad.  In general the meals here cost between $5 and $10 or maybe $15.