Jun 29: Welcome and Farewell Party
This morning's dorm breakfast's theme was "slime" apparently. There was slimy algae in the miso soup, slime-sauced jellyfish salad, and natto on rice. >_< I can't say it was my favourite meal, but it was very long-lasting evidently, as I wasn't dying of hunger by lunchtime as I sometimes am.
Today at work I did some ML and MAP estimation on paper, and started implementing the MAP estimated Gaussian that I worked out at Kabutoya-san's direction. By the end of the day it was able to generate a number (I don't know how accurate said number is, however) that is supposedly the probability of observing the data that it is given. I will get to testing it tomorrow.
At lunch today I had something I thought was going to be Chinese charsiu, but it turned out to be chicken! Surprise! Oh well it tasted fine (albeit a little dry) so I'm not really complaining haha. Today's curry didn't look exciting either, so I don't think I missed out on much in particular. After eating we played handiball, and my serve was not as good today, but I never actually served a fault, which is a large improvement in consistency. :D Nishida-san has started doing a rather pro-looking serve that I am going to start copying, as he's able to get the ball lower over the net than I am.
In the afternoon, there were different power saving measures in place. The air conditioning is definitely back on, which is nice (unless it's stealing power from like, a hospital or something haha), but from 2 until maybe 4, the lights were out! What the hell!? I understand that most people are using a monitor at work, but I happened to be trying to do math on paper! I therefore had to move my mouse periodically so that my monitor would stay awake and illuminate my maths. >_< The messages over the intercom used vocabulary I don't know, so it came as a bit of a surprise when the lights suddenly went out and stayed out.
After work my projectmates (we are the PIGs, for Portal Imagination Group or Portal Imaging Group or something, don't ask me why they named themselves that) and I went to an izakaya in Yokochuu where we held a party welcoming me and saying farewell to Miyata-san. Having a welcome party 3 weeks after you arrive apparently means sitting there uncomfortably while everyone releases a barrage of compliments at you. I'm very glad that they like me here, but I am very bad at receiving compliments, and I was practically hiding under my notebook by the end. >_< Kabutoya-san got a little drunk and really talked Kurauchi-san's ear off about me. >_< Augh! So embarrassing! (but better than the alternative, to be sure)
One thing I am very glad about is that they said that I'm a good English teacher haha. I try to explain words I use in detail, and they appear to really like it. I'm glad I can be useful to them while my Japanese is still to poor to communicate. They have a thing they do called "nazokake" or something where someone stands up and makes a pun to try to make people laugh. O_O I told them about how the English equivalent of that brand of wordplay is called a "pun", and explained how the "rules" are different in English because we have far fewer homophones. I was unfortunately unable to make any good puns on the spot. Most of the puns I could think of off the top of my head are risque, so I think I will save them for later. Much later (read never). The best I was able to do for the night was when they were explaining that I don't have many fellow co-ops due to the earthquake, and I said "Ah yes, I'm peerless.", which is mediocre by the most generous evaluations (and not even a pun by the worst). At least it gave me an opportunity to illustrate the general structure of how a conversational pun works. >_< I also taught them the word "modesty" and few others.
One thing that worries me a little bit (and is also an ego boost if it's true, which I doubt) is that they also said that my Japanese sounds very "natural", and they say that when they hear it they always expect me to be able to speak a lot more than I can. This may be the source of future problems with other people I need to speak with. >_< However, it could also just be more complimentary lies haha.
We also talked a bit about blood types and Kabutoya-san gave me a pop quiz right then and there by asking me which of the probability distributions I have learned so far should I use if I wanted to model the blood types in Japan, given that they have 40/30/20/10% A/O/B/AB population. I apparently got it right by saying multinomial distribution, which is a good thing, because Kabutoya-san was a little drunk and told me that if I got it wrong, "maybe you are going to hell, perhaps." D: A rather severe punishment!
At the party, which I was told was a drinking party, not that much drinking was actually required. I had some sapporo, some shiso shochu called "tan-taka-tan" (which was really interesting, you could really taste the shiso) and a cassis-orange that I made for myself at the liquor table. I ended up having drink the cassis-orange rather quickly, because almost right after I made it they decided that the party was over. O_O Oh well, I have yet to see anything above 20% alcohol content here, so it was fine.
The food at the nomikai was good, but quite minimal, we had edamame, some tofu salad, some hakusai (pickled lettuce) and some fried rice, so I got some oyako-don at LAWSON STATION when I got home. There was a guy in the LAWSON STATION that was nodding at me like he knew me, but I couldn't recognize him. I must have been giving him a puzzled look, because he said that he saw me at Irori (the izakaya near my dorm). It was friendly-man! I apologized for not recognizing him without his hat or glasses. He said it was ok, and then we didn't have much to talk about, which was ok, because my oyako-don was done heating up and I could leave. Once I got back to my dorm I started writing this blog, and now that I'm done it's time to go to bed.
Night!
PS: At the nomikai, I only got made fun of for thinking Hayashi is comfortable once!!! A new record!!!
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