First week working at NIMS

I have been working at NIMS for a week now, well mostly been shown around and had a couple of days training at the TEMs. It has been very nice, and they have been taking good care of me. They have two microscopes that I will use as much as I possibly can: one or two times a week probably (they have a lot of users). They have both the instruments and the software we were lacking in Oslo, so now I can do some EFTEM-SI…yeah!! I will have my first presentation of my PhD-project for the group tomorrow, so I hope they think that the project is interesting and want to help me with it.

This is my office. I have this BIG room all by myself (room for about ten people). The building seems pretty new and is a bit like MINAlab… it is big and has sort of this empty feeling, even though it is not empty at all. And since there hasn’t been anyone else in the office, and I haven’t had that much to do, I have been a bit bored. But this week two new interns are arriving at NIMS and will be in the office, so that might be nice, and I will probably get a better working moral. Part from that, the group has a coffee break every day at 15.30, an hour, to mingle and chat. That has been very good, and I have met most of the group on these occasions. The group is very nice and seems very social. We met them out one night at a restaurant and ended up going out drinking with them, it was nice. But the next day I had my first day at the microscope…hehe….luckily I didn’t have a hangover (but Georg on the other hand…..).

This weekend we had three days off, Monday was a holiday. So we went around Tsukuba to get to know the area and to shop, and on Sunday we went to Tokyo to see the Imperial Palace and Ginza. The Palace was very nice, well the gardens and the ground around then. The Palace is just open for visitors twice a year. We had a great day just walking around and seeing these gardens and then exploring Ginza a bit. We went to the Sony building. It was quite cool to see what they are about to sell next.

Georg thought it was quite funny that he was walking around there with a free software T-shirt…:) (Since they have been on collision course with them on their new restricted discs)

Put out some more pictures from our Tokyo trip here,