Today started early after a full (and I mean full) night's sleep. I had a cup of coffee from the contraption hot pot thing and then showered and kissed my beautiful wife good-bye to meet Han at the lobby. I was perhaps 2 minutes late. We met and took the Tsukuba Express to the stop we walked to yesterday and walked into the office. We were about 15 minutes early and had changed training classrooms from one to another for size issues. We had the students finish the labs from the day before and quickly went through the presentations for the hardware then headed down to the lab and worked on taking apart the one system we could take apart. I walked them through the process until lunchtime then we went to the company cafeteria. I had chicken, rice, gyoza and some sort of mildly flavored fruit pudding (I think it felt more like jello). From there it was back to the lab to continue working on the system for taking it apart and putting it back together again. We worked on the same system all afternoon with a few exceptions where we split some time on one of the others. The company was worried about the other 2 as they would be sold to customers eventually. We managed to get through the rest of the day on time and finished up by 5:00pm. They went over some things that I typically don't go over but it all worked out well.
They were having a party for us at 5:30pm so Han and I had to stick around for that. Since I passed out the night before I was a bit concerned that I was abandoning Daniela and would rather we did it on a different night but it would be rude for me to refuse so I attended. It was a nice time. They had a very large spread of food that was carried out over several courses. They had Sapporo beer in quantity. I kept my glass mostly full so they didn't keep filling it up on me. I like the beer of course but with it being a teaching night I really couldn't drink too much. I had maybe the equivalent of a bottle and a half of beer. The food was a lot of different things. They had some sashimi and hot dog like sausages, salads, cucumbers with some sort of marinated barley. Potato hash browns, pizza, Japanese style pancakes, noodles and a few other things. I pretty much tried everything and it was all good. During the dinner they all stood up and said something in English. They are almost all limited in ability but they said something. Later in the dinner the bosses of various departments also showed up to get some food and drink and introduced themselves. They drank a lot of beer, much more than the students. They also had shochu but I didn't drink any of that for the same reason I limited my beer intake.They all commented on my ability with chopsticks because I am very good with them for a westerner. After all the students spoke I made a brief speech. When it was time to finish we all stood up and made a noise and clapped to end the party. Where it was a party I didn't take any pictures of the food or students though probably I should have. All I managed for pictures in the day was of the classroom.
Watanabe-san took us to the train station by cab because he was going there himself. He rode the Tsukuba Express a few stops shorter than we did so we talked with him a bit until he got out. When we returned to Asakusa we split our ways at the hotel and I found Daniela was not in the room. There was a note that she was in the Itanova restaurant of the hotel so I went down and met her. She was working on some information for her work and drinking tea by then but she had eaten dinner. We talked for a while and she showed me what she had posted to Facebook so far for her trip to Japan. Then when they told us they were stopping service for the night we went up to the room and called it a night.
The pictures from Japan day 5 are here.
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