Mental Health Weekend

I am hopelessly behind. It's clear by now. The things that I am about to tell you happened over a week ago ... but it might be a story worth telling.

The company was about to have it's yearly "Mental Health Weekend" - a chance to relax at an Onsen, that is, a Japanese hot spring, and let the mind unwind. Good dinner, bathing in the hot spring, some sort of party and sketching classes was on the menu. "Mental health" ... yeah, right. "Mental Weekend" is more like it.

The bus ride took about two hours, and we were steadily going higher up in the mountains. After a while it looked like wilderness ... well, almost. If one forgot about the power lines and other signs of humans being around. It's all relative, ya know, but for Japan I this might have been wilderness.

We arrived at the Minakami Onsen, a fairly large hotel built around a hot spring. The first thing to do was a lecture about something - this was friday afternoon, and the company had to make it seem as if we were working. But me and the other two foreigners there were free to roam - since we wouldn't understand the lecture, it being in Japanese and all, nobody really cared. We chose to stroll around the little city that was Minakami - strangest thing, I wouldn't have thought there were cities like it in Japan.

The town was mostly falling apart. We walked from one depressing building to the next, from an outdoor pool with green water to a pedestrian bridge that was closed because the wooden boards that made up the gangway were rotten. We found a house that was about to fall out onto the street, and most certainly would have already had not someone used two metal poles to prop it up. Check the pictures. Finally, we just bought a couple beers and some snacks and sat down on a bench and relaxed for a bit.

We got back to the hotel just when the lecture was over. Time to hit the hot spring! First, to the hotel room, switch to yukata (a thin kimono) with a warmer jacket over. Then down to the two pools with water straight from the spring ... it was hot indeed. As we were sitting there, slowly boiling, one of the employees came by with a thermometer, checking the temperature. So I asked, and the larger, cooler pool, was forty degrees - the smaller one was 49. I tried the small one as well, but I couldn't make myself put more than my legs in there. Hot, hot, hot.

Then dinner. In a large hall loads of small tables were lined up, and behind each one. a leg-less Japanese chair was placed. We all had one table each, filled with strange but yummy Japanese foods. Beer and sake was served as well, of course.

After the dinner it was party time. It is always fun to see what happens to the usually so well behaved and well mannered Japanese when they drink and party ... I swear, it's not the same people! There was basically unlimited alcohol there, of all sorts and kinds. Plus loads of snacks - some more normal, like potato chips or wasabi peas, and others more unusual, like dried squid (which was actually not so bad at all). Or cheese-sticks with fish on the outside. And then there were karaoke, of course.

The party went on until late. After the hall that we were partying in closed, a bunch of us went up to someones hotel room and kept the party going. Sometimes it seemed as if an experiment was being carried out - "how much can a westerner really drink?" Our glasses were always filled, and not only that, there were a few people who insisted on trying to keep up with us foreigners in the drinking race ... most entertainingly, a man who is a vice-president at the company. We took pictures, he looked at it and exclaimed "But I'm a vice president! I must look respectable!" and then he laughed and drank more. :-)

It was, on the whole, a very tough weekend ... I gave up on the party around 3:30am (hey, I was at least the last foreigner standing), and then it was up around 8 to get breakfast and then go to sketching class. There's not much to say about that ... most of Saturday kinda went by in a bit of a haze. I finally got home around 5pm. And then it was just about time for the next party ... but that's a different story.

Oh, and there are some pictures here.

A Call For Help :-)

Ok, now I need a bit of help here. I was planning on going to SE Asia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam for Christmas and New Year's. However ... my travel partner recently quit her job and might not be able to make it. I'm looking to make a new plan...

I looked into tickets to Europe, and most of them are incredibly expensive. If I fly Aero-Flot I can get a ticket at a good price ... but I'm afraid it comes with a drunk pilot included.

I could, of course, stay in Japan. Some of my co-workers will. Even though New Year's is mostly a family holiday here, there are still plenty of people who like to party, and I'm sure there would be something cool to do.

But I've never been to Thailand or Vietnam, so that would be very neat, too. I can see myself sitting on a warm beach in Thailand, sipping sweet drinks and reading good books for a week or so. Is anyone else heading down there around that time? Any holiday-travelers at all? You can tell me; I won't join you if it sounds like a romantic get-away is planned. :-)

Also, since I'm kinda brand new to Thailand, if I go, where should I go? I'd like for there to be both beautiful beaches and parties, but not too much party ... I don't like to get to a beach littered with cigarettes and broken glass in the morning. But maybe that never happens in Thailand. Or maybe that always happens in Thailand. As I said, I'm a total beginner here. Help me out, please.

Or if you have some other suggestions that's not too far from Japan ... any ideas happily accepted!

Kyoto

Sorry all, I've been a bit quiet for a while. The week was fairly busy, but the weekend is when it got really crazy ... that's for later though; now I'll just tell you about last weekend, the one I spent in Kyoto. There will be pictures - I'll add them later, I promise. There will be a link to a page that has them, and maybe some thumbnails.

Anyway ... the weekend that we went, the first weekend of November, is supposed to be the best time to go to Kyoto. There are loads of maple trees there, and in the fall they all turn yellow, orange and red and it's incredibly beautiful. Also, that weekend is a three day weekend, extra popular for that reason. Kyoto is popular among Japanese tourists as well.

If, now, you're guessing this means Kyoto would be packed with people, I got one thing to say to you - you're right. Every bus (which we were told were a great way to get around) we got on was, or got, ridiculously packed. Often to the point that they did not let more people on. The roads were equally packed, meaning this "there-is-barely-room-to-breathe-in-here" bus often just sat there, blocked by cars on all sides. Top speed seemed to be about 5mph. It turned out to be faster to get off and walk ... the side walks were slightly, but only slightly, less packed.

I mentioned that the maple trees wear their fall colors and they say it's breathtakingly beautiful. That's true. I'm sure it is beautiful. But this fall has been unusually warm, and everything was still green. Bit of a bummer.

SO, now that I've done nothing but whined, I'd like to point out that we did have a great time. We walked from temple to temple, in a valiant effort to see all temples in Kyoto. There are about 1600 temples and 400 shrines (temples = Buddhism, shrines = Shinto) so 2000 holy places to visit.

During 2 days of intense walking, we saw 10.

Maybe.

More like 8 or 9. It kinda felt like 2000 though, does that count?

At that rate, visiting all of them would take 200 days. If they could be found, that is. Some of them must be tiny. There are about 3 million people in Kyoto, I think, so actually 2000 temples or shrines means there's still 1500 people per temple ... That's quite a lot, actually.

Some of the temples that we saw were very beautiful. The nature, the gardens, the views. Some were more unusual. We saw stone gardens, moss gardens (check out the pics for this one, when I have them uploaded ... there are many different kinds of moss, some are good and some are bad... It's quite funny in the pictures). We saw a temple that was almost all covered in gold, and it's Japanese name means just that, the golden temple. There's also a silver temple, but it's founder spent all his money before he bought the silver that was supposed to cover the temple, so there's just the name. I guess over-reaching happened back in the day too.

We went home from Kyoto the same way we got there, with the Nozomi bullet train. 370km, 4 stops, 2 hours 20 minutes. Pretty impressive, very convenient, and cheap if you buy the tickets from abroad ... it's cheap for tourists, Japanese people have to pay through the nose.

Ok .... pics coming soon! I promise!

UPDATE: Pictures from Kyoto are HERE!

What am I doing in Japan, really?

By now, loads of people have asked me what the **** I'm actually doing in Japan. As if karaoke, parties and food poisoning is not enough. So, well, I guess I'd better tell y'all.

The short answer is I'm working on my Master's Thesis. Yes, I was supposed to do that years ago. For several reasons, that never happened. So there I was, last winter, after three years working, still one thesis short of a Master's degree. It was getting kind of silly.

Last January me, Richard and Stef went on vacation in Japan. While there (well, here), we met Mats, who was writing his thesis at KDDI. Matter of fact, if I understood things right, it was his second thesis... So I figured, heck, if he can write two, I'll be darned if I can't get to one. I applied through Uppsala University for the same position Mats had had, long story short, I got it.

What I'm doing here is mostly related to video processing. KDDI Research Labs (which is where I work at) already has, largely thanks to Mats, a system that can do some tracking of video news. I'm trying to improve that system by adding and exploring new capabilities.

At this point, some of you will be nodding in agreement, aha, OK, tracking video news, got it. But most will be wondering "OK, now, what the heck does that mean then!?".

Have no fear. I'll try to explain.

In the future, people will be getting video news feed or clips through internet, mobile-phone, TV and maybe other, unforeseen, channels. There will not be fewer things to look at than there are today, in fact, most likely there will be more. Also, more and more people acquire the ability to record these clips - through video recorders with hard drives, computers, what not.

But here's the problem - the more stuff you got stored, the harder it will be to find something. And as more news is thrown at you, it gets harder to pick out the pieces that matters to you.

This is something that a lot of researchers has realized. There are many teams working on solving different parts of this. The future common though is a system where a user can ask the computer for certain video clips, or images, without having to apply "tags" or anything else in advance. A system where the computer, in one way or another, "understands" what's in the video clips and images.

(I put understands in quotation marks because I'm using it in a very loose meaning ... I do not intend to get into a philosophical question on whether computers can indeed understand anything at all).

Our niche, so to speak, is to focus on video images and news only, push that as far as possible. Given one news story, tell me when more is shown - that is in some ways the most basic question that we're trying to answer. We don't worry about speech or on-screen text - many other people are doing that. We're merely trying to push image and video recognition as far as possible.

And as for me, personally, I'm just trying to add one or two more bricks to what might one day become a nice big house.


Something else: In a few days, I'll post a write-up about my recent trip to Kyoto, along with pictures of some absolutely stunning temples and sights... So - pics are on their way! :-)