Japan

New year's eve and already in Japan for 1,5 week. So maybe it is about time to tell something about my time here. As most of you will remember this years snowfall and how the airports handled it (or didn't), well I was one of those lucky people to have a flight at that time. From Edinburgh to Narita (Tokyo) through Amsterdam (which was impossible). Instead of going back home and try to rebook something online I stood in line for six hours to gt rebooked. Because of this I was able to get a flight to Dusseldorf so that my parents could pick me up there. This way I could at least spend the weekend with my family and then drive from there to Schiphol (Amsterdam), to fly to Narita.
When I finally got onto the plane to Japan I couldn't believe it. After being nervous for about 3 days I got to spend my Birthday in Tokyo with my girlfriend (Manami). We stayed at a hotel in Asakusa and the first touristic thing we did was going to a Japanese shrine. After 2 nights we went to her parents house which is a bit more outside of Tokyo, here I got some nice country side views and some time to get adjusted to the new timezone.
I have to say I didn't really did that much research into Japan since my main reason of going was to spent the holidays with Manami, so when she asked me several times where I wanted to go I didn't know so well. Luckily from their hometown we could see Fuji mountain and since we don't really have those in the Netherlands I thought it would be nice to go get a little closer look. We decided to go to Hakone where we had a super luxurious traditional Japanese hotel. The hotel had a beautiful garden and several hot spring baths.
We went out to lake Ashinoko to get some nice views of Fuji mountain and off course some pictures.
On the way back we stopped to see a Japanese castle in Odawara, I had no idea we would stumble upon this which made the whole trip even better.

One of the other benefits of being here is that I finally get a closer look to the Japanese car culture. Since I am doing some research about the car industry and globalization and such it is nice to actually see some of the Japanese traffic and infrastructure so I can understand a bit better why their car's are they way they are (and I don't mean the ones made for the European market).

So this will be it for this year, I wish you all the best for the next.

Sander

Snow, snow and guess what....... More snow

So I know I should have made a new post way earlier, but to be honest there hasn't been going on to much because of massive snowfall. So unless you would have loved to hear about my research for my presentation (which I am giving tomorrow) there wasn't that much to talk about. The school was practically closed for the first week of December which  gave me time to work at home (on my presentation that is). We are doing a Pecha Kucha which means you will get to pick 20 slides/pictures and have 20 seconds to talk before it switches to the next one. This will give you about 6min and 40 seconds for your complete presentation. And since I am so experienced in presentations (not), this is making me quite nervous. None of us really know what is to be expected of us. And the fact that because of the snow it has been a while since I could meet up with a teacher to talk about it, doesn't make it any easier either. So to get my head of of that for a bit I am just going to show you what my new neighborhood has been looking like for the past weeks.

November

It's already December and here I am making my last official post for November (time goes fast). I havn't been at college to much lately and this because of 2 reasons. The first one being that 2 of my friends came over from the Netherlands to visit me. And the second one, well maybe you might have even seen something about it on the news...... Scotland is covered by snow!!! Never in my life have I expierienced snow like this. It started on saturday and it's still going on right now (I even had to give my friends the car I had to go back to the Netherlands because the airport was closed). So instead of talking about work I will just show you some pictures of the city instead.
Enjoy!