I still need to finish uploading pictures from my camera to Flickr, but in the meantime I thought I summarize my trip to Japan. This is the first of what I’m expecting to be 3 parts.  This gets me from Santa Barbara through the last day of the conference, but before I meet up with my parents.

I was pretty nervous the days leading up to the trip. I hadn’t traveled abroad since I was a senior in high school when my parents and I went to Madrid and Paris over Spring Break. To add to my anxiety, I was headed to a country I knew little about, save for my experiences with Nintendo. I was especially worried about communicating since the only word I knew was “Konichiwa,” which I learned from a Simpsons sweatshirt I had in 4th grade.

I left on October 13 from Santa Barbara bound for Kansei airport near Osaka with a connection in San Francisco. Luckily, I was able to travel with a couple other grad students along with my professor, so getting around wasn’t too hard. We arrived on October 14th at the Kyoto rail station at around 6 pm. Kyoto station is quite the site. It has about 10 floors, but is very open. There are some nice restaurants near the top of the station, as well as a department store. The hotel I stayed at was a Japanese business hotel, meaning small yet efficient rooms. The first night, not wanting to stray to far from the hotel, we ramen at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. It was a great meal, and cheap, too. I was a little embarrassed by my chopsticks skills, but those eventually improved. I called it an early night since I hadn’t slept at all on the plane.

The reason for my trip to Japan was the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors (ISCS), which took place from Monday to Thursday. I was giving a talk on some of the work I’ve done on Tuesday, so most of my free time went into getting my presentation ready. This was only the second talk I would be giving, and I wanted it to be polished. Jet lag helped, waking me up at 6 am everyday so I had a few hours to work before the conference started. I thought the conference blew by pretty quickly. On Monday, a large group of us headed out for dinner only to find out that Japanese restaurants don’t handle large groups well. Four is a big number for dinner, so trying to find a place for 8 was near impossible. (As an aside, I really like small restaurants. There’s a personal feel to them, almost like you’re eating a meal in someone’s house.)

On Tuesday, we went out to an izekaya, which is a restaurant where people go after work to eat and drink. This particular spot specialized in yakitori, or grilled chicken. No part of the chicken is off-limits, so if you ever wanted to tried grilled chicken heart on a bamboo skewer, a yakitori-ya is the place to go. I had a great dinner with my professor and some current and former group members. We ate a lot of great food and drank some good beer (Asahi is my favorite, btw).

Wednesday was the day for my professor’s plenary talk, and hence the night for karaoke. It’s become a tradition (if 2 times make a tradition) of going out to sing karaoke when there’s a conference in Japan. In Japan, karaoke bars aren’t bars, but rather buildings with private rooms. There were about 20 of us, so we reserved a large room.  I’m not sure how many pitchers of beer we, or should I say Umesh, ordered.  It was a lot.  Enough to have me screaming “Shot Through The Heart” into a microphone with Nick at one in the morning.

Thursday morning was a little painful after Wednesday night.  I had my usual breakfast of Starbucks and a pastry.  Not very Japanese, but I have a serious caffeine addiction that I’m not going to just ignore.  My parents were coming into town that night, and their hotel has a remote check-in counter at the train station.  Since my hotel was right next to the train station, I wandered around hoping to find it, but to no avail.  I wasn’t very interested in the morning talks, so I didn’t mind missing them.  Around 11:30 I was starting to get a little hungry, so I hopped on a bus and headed over to Kyoto University in hopes of running into other UCSB people.  I found 7 of them, and we went to have lunch a nearby noodle place.  We got some odd looks as we walked into the restaurant.  Eight was roughly half their capacity.  After lunch, it was back for the afternoon talks.  Those wrapped the conference.  We took a bus headed back to the station area.  The rest of the UCSB people got off near downtown to find dinner.  I said good-bye, made it back to the station, then took a cab to the Westin so I could meet my parents.