Personal Weblog of Annett Thogersen

Monday, September 18, 2006

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,

Sunday, September 10, 2006

IMC16 in Sapporo

This week I was in Sapporo for the International Microscopy Congress. I arrived on Saturday morning by plane. It was a nice plane trip and hardly any clouds, so I could see most of Japan as we went over. I was pretty tired when I arrived, from being sick all week, so that day I mostly spent in bed. The next day I used to do my sightseeing, and take my tourist pictures. I went to visit the Eiffel tour of Sapporo so I could see most of the town and the surroundings. Then I saw the clock house (not extremely interesting), the old parliament building, the botanical garden and the university. After taking soo many pictures with no people on them I started trying to get in the picture myself, which I had a lot of fun with (no…I did not loose my mind).

Yes, I am not extremely fan of cactuses.

In the evening I went to the welcome party at the conference. It wasn’t so much fun, 2000 people trying to mingle and talk to the people they had met before, and me not knowing anyone, resulted in going home early. The conference started on Monday with presentations, lectures and posters. Except from visiting some talks, not much happened on Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday after lectures there was a conference ceremony with a classical concert. At the ceremony, which was pretty boring, the Emperor and Empress of Japan were present (..pretty cool or what?). He himself actually used to be an electron microscopist. Wasn’t aloud to take any pictures though. After that we went to a beer party (free…!!). There I met these three guys below, and we went out to get more beer and sake. Well….the sake was a bad idea, I was sooo hung-over the next day that I slept until 14.00.

Ivo (Holland/Kyoto Univ.), Francis (Scottland/Strathclyde Univ.), me and Anjan (India/Singapore/ MIT).

Thursday evening it was the conference dinner. All of these parties are the same, food and drinks on a few tables with peoples walking around and talking. Not always a good thing, often too little food and loooong queues. Afterwards we went out to drink some more at another place, but we all went home pretty early due to the hard night the day before. On Friday were the last lectures and MY poster session (put out my poster here). It was very interesting, and I got some feedback and contacts. After the sessions was the Farwell party. As before, there wasn’t that much food so Francis and I decided to get some ramen at the famous Ramen Alley. It took us some time to find it, but when we did we got our reward: 2 beers. We went through the whole street and only one served ramen (but it had a 7m long queue!). However, then we found the rest of the street (probably the old street), and there we found some ramen places. We ended up in a small place (only place for about 6 people), and it was just soooo good ramen. It was definitively worth the trip. On Saturday morning I took the plane back to Tokyo, where Georg was waiting for me. I had a lot of fun, but it was extremely nice to come home (to Tsukuba and Georg) too:)

The beer we got in ramen Alley, it was pretty funny.

I put out the rest of the pictures from my Sapporo trip here.

Friday, September 01, 2006

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.

ICPS 2006 in Bucharest Romania

In August Georg, Sanja, Dina, Mateusz, Nicolay, Klaus, Ingvild, Yngvild and me went to Croatia for a beach holiday and then to Bucharest in Romania for this years ICPS. We had a very interesting and fun time. Georg has written something about Croatia, so I won’t mention much about it here, but we had a lot of fun.

Romania on the other hand was more an “interesting” experience. I expected that the country was poor. What was waiting for us, however, was not what we expected at all. It is not that I expected the people there to be extremely nice to us all the time, but here the people were often directly rude, impolite and if you expected people to smile back… think again. For instance at restaurants, waiters were standing behind you ready to take your plate the moment you were finished. Sometimes they did the same when we were not even finished yet. We got very tired of being treated like this all the time. But in the end we did find a couple of good restaurants with good waiters. We once spent the whole day there… It was our little refuge.


Apart from the people, the Romanian culture and language was very interesting, and we both felt that we wanted to learn more about it when we got home – this never happened, because we immediately had to start preparing for our trip to Japan. They are really proud of their Roman heritage and show that in every way possible. Commercials show Romans, buildings have Roman-like architecture and they still got their roman language (very much like Italian). It is also very interesting to see how much Romania wants to be a part of the EU….it is a LOT!! You see EU flags everywhere. If there is a Romanian flag somewhere, next to it is always an EU flag. It is a bit too obvious…:)… fast cash.

We also went to see the parliament palace. It was HUGE. It is the second largest administrative building in the world (just after the Pentagon). No wonder Romania is poor after building this enormous thing.. Wikipedia writes the following: ”Effectively, the building, due to its immense size, cuts the city into two—an urban planner's nightmare. Constructing the Palace and the Centru Civic required demolishing about one-fifth of the historic districts of Bucharest. The neighborhoods and churches that were razed to make way for the behemoth are remembered to this day.” The guided tour through the palace we took was very interesting and rather honest though.


During the ICPS we got to see some of the countryside of Romania, and that was a lot more beautiful and calming. If we will go back to Romania, this is where we will go. We went to visit two castles, among Bran Castle where Dracula was supposed to be living according to Bram Stoker. But in real life Vlad Dracul (Vlad the Impaler) was there for only two weeks for refuge. And no vampire stuff either. We expected to see blood and vampire stuff…boy were we disappointed, nothing more than an old castle. Furthermore there was a huge queue, and when we were out of the queue, we were out of the castle…

The ICPS was a lot of fun, a bit chaotic though, but with the amount of struggle the committee had been through the last week they managed to do a great job. Can`t be easy to live in a “democratic”(……ehh) country. The Republic Party took away all of the student dorms set away for the students at ICPS a week before the conference, because the organization for physics student refused to join their party in return… horrible. But we had a great time, with lots of parties and meeting new people….and we are now looking forward to next year in London…bound to be good. At least in London it won’t be 46 degrees Celsius in the shadow….puh…that was HOT!

Fore more pictures look here.