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Published: June 19th 2006
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Kinkakuji
Calm, beautiful Kinkakuji. On Sunday I studied for my EE midterm which I took on Monday. This is why people don't take real classes while overseas. It's damn hard to do everything.
Unfortunately, after finishing the midterm, we were given TWO DAYS to design a microprocessor. Yeah, a real one. The first week in my EE class, we had written Pong in assembly - and now our task was to design a fully functional processor that could run, for example, that program. Again, I repeat, in two days.
So that was my next two days. Eventual success, but not without an after-midnight session and lots of hard work. Turns out that designing microprocessors is not easy.
The following day we made a field trip to look at an old house. It was pretty, except exactly like everything else we've seen in Kyoto. The garden-in-an-inner-atrium idea is pretty snazzy, and I definitely would like my house someday to have one, but that's about the only interesting thing that was at this house. After a tour, the crazy old landlady sat down and yakked at us while we nibbled Japanese snackcakes and sipped a tea that tasted vaguely like gunpowder, while trying to
In the House
Cool inner atrium. That's about all. ignore the smell of cat. Food + missing Japanese class means that it wasn't a total waste of our time, though.
On Friday, we had a field trip for the innovation class. We went to an "innovative hospital," which was actually a lot cooler of an adventure than it sounds. The whole building was architecturally designed to be expansive, feel open, a happy place, etc.; the equipment was all new and cool; and, most cool, the entire hospital ran on a digital system that unified the entire process from check-in to linked-data (history, fMRI scans, etc.) display during an examination. Some pretty snazzy ideas were there, and the head of the hospital showed us around, which is pretty unusual. All the Japanese people bowed deeply in deference to him and us; people were thrilled to have students from Stanford visit the hospital and evaluate its innovative capacity.
We then visited a pretty castle, which, oddly enough, is situated right in the middle of downtown Osaka. Check out the cool pictures. The height and the view were about the only things going for it, though - it was a museum now, but blindly engrossed in its own idea of
At the Hospital
Being served coffee in china during the presentation. We poor students enjoy the luxury of waiting staff. appropriate level of detail. You can trace the entire lineage of the family! Good times! Except that it wasn't, and instead was rather exceedingly boring. Pretty view, though, and it was funded by the center, so no complaints.
That night we had a Taiko performance by the group Kodo. They're pretty famous, and generally considered to be one of the best Taiko groups currently around, so it was pretty cool to be able to go see them. Funded yet again by the Bings, we got a chance to see some amazing drumming. No pictures allowed during the performance, though, so you can only imagine. The strange thing about this performance, though, was that it was actually a double-performance with a Japanese actor who specializes in acting as a very graceful Japanese woman. This back-story that his acting provided, however, was more of an excuse to display the proficiency of the Taiko drummers than really focusing on him, which was probably good. The drummers were pretty awesome, but we were rather underwhelmed with whatever his acting abilities were supposed to provide.
The following morning, a large number of our friends headed off to China. One of the classes is
Even better than the hospital
The playground nearby. It's equipped with all manner of things upon which one may scramble in delight. We took a decently long lunch break to enjoy its snazziness. a “Japan in contemporary foreign affairs” class, and around now the class all packs up and heads off to a symposium in China, with other Stanford abroad programs (D.C. and Beijing at the very least). Mostly, it just seems like an excuse to go to China, but I must admit I had a twinge of jealousy that I was staying back. I couldn't afford the units to take the class, though.
On Saturday, Aydin, a good friend from high school who currently lives in Tokyo, came to visit Kyoto. We met up in the late afternoon, we went to dinner, and then headed down to the river. Unfortunately, because everyone had stayed up really late with the China people the night before, there wasn't too much excitement that night. We went to the river, hung out, watched the didgeridoo player (apparently semi-professional), met up with Carel and Toby, talked to a few Stanford people, etc. It was a good night, but definitely not one of the crazier nights, which is too bad because I wanted to show Aydin a good time. Nonetheless, it was good to catch up with a good friend that I really enjoying hanging out with.
View From the Castle
The view from the castle. It's on top of a hill, s it's not actually like 25 stories tall, but you can tell the placement is odd. Then on Sunday, Tim and I went to visit Nijo Castle (yet another castle), which was cool because it was designed to be an ostentatious assault on the emperor. The castle had complex carvings, elaborate embroidery, and these really cool "nightingale" floors that were designed to squeak when they were stepped on (so no one could sneak up on you). It sounds vaguely like random bowing of a string instrument, and it really is pretty much impossible to not make noise. If anyone is curious, Wikipedia it, but basically the issue is not pressure (force per unit area) like you'd expect, which you might hope to alter in hopes of silence, but total force per beam (which are pretty wide and pretty long, so it's fairly unrealistic to imagine distributing your weight across multiple to mask your noise. So the whole tour was accompanied by the amusing squeaky sounds.
Unfortunately, Nijo castle was super-hardcore about the no-pictures rule and actually even prohibits sketching while in the castle, so you don't get any pictures. Nonetheless, the best part was the gardens, of which you do get pictures. Afterwards, we went to Kinkakuji temple. The "Kin" in Kinkakuji is the
Performance Venue
The pretty theater in which we had our Taiko performance. same kanji as money, so named because the entire temple is faced in gold leaf. It's beautifully located on a small mountain pond, next to multiple wooded paths and idyllic coves. It's extremely serene, beautiful, and relaxing. Plus they gave lots of free samples on the way out, so I got some tasty free food in my belly before taking a long walk back. I didn't decide to walk the whole way initially, but after a while I realized what was going to happen and gave in trekking for a couple of hours across Kyoto. It's good to do this every now and then, because I always discover new things when I take walks through the city.
I had a pleasant stroll through the city, eventually arriving home in time for dinner and a quiet evening of guitar study.
~Danny
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Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leafs a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay R. Frost