First week in Tsukuba, Japan

We arrived in Tsukuba on Sunday the 27th of August in the morning. The plane trip went well, part from forgetting some papers concerning my visa (that I didn`t think I would need), but I could mail them the papers later…puh. At the bus station the person in charge of international visitors at NIMS (National Institute of Material Science, where I will work) met us and leaded us to the place where we would live the next four months, the Takezono House. We knew that it was the cheapest alternative they had given us, so we didn’t expect it to be “all that”. However, the apartment was so BIG! We were shocked. We got a two room apartment, with a bath tub, balcony, TV, video, fax, washing machine, dryer, air conditioning, Japanese toilet, huge fridge/freezer, internet (FREE) and a big living room. For only 6.000 JPY (42 EUR, 360 NOK), we also rented two bikes for the four months we will stay here.

On Sunday there was a City-Festival going on in Tsukuba. The streets were filled with small booths with Japanese-take away food, snacks and toys, and there was a big parade. Apart from taking the pictures below, we also filmed it… it was crazy!

We took one week off before I go to Sapporo for a conference and Georg starts to work at the University of Tsukuba. During this week we were supposed to explore Tsukuba and go to Tokyo, but then I got ill. :( Although I caught a cold, probably due to a lot of changes in temperature over a short period of time and little sleep, we have seen quite a bit of Tsukuba already. It is a very nice and western like city, very international. It is a small, planned city just north of Tokyo, with just under 200 000 citizens. The city is called Tsukuba Science City and was founded in 1987 in order to move some of the big research companies and institutions into the vicinity of Tokyo. It is really a more quiet and peaceful town than we expected, and I already think we will have a hard time leaving in December.

I put out more pictures here.