Weather: rainy · Lunch: the usual · Dinner: udon and shrimp · Moflin (Gombóc): 6 days, cute as ever
The postdrome, the migraine’s after-effect, still lingers, and I got in a bit late too. Viktória asked in the morning (on WhatsApp, of course) whether I was coming to the Japanese class. For now it was still about “suki desu,” so I didn’t miss much. But I’ll go in, all right. Just let me get better from the migraine first.
The mynah bird
For that matter, I discovered to my surprise that the mynah bird is not native to Japan! And here in Nagoya it’s widespread. It’s an Indian bird, actually, and honestly, when I first came across it, I was rather surprised.
As it turns out, it settled in here, and in Japan it can only be found in the wild in this area. Around Nagoya it feels quite at home. I suppose there aren’t so many predators, and the weather isn’t much different — though it’s probably more pleasant for them too. In any case it looked very funny when, on the streets of Nagoya, numerous mynah birds crept and flew about, rather like blackbirds.
In the lab
Sakuma and I managed to clear up a problem. For some reason I couldn’t log in to the machines remotely (and they’re beastly machines here), but we fixed the problem quickly. I got straight down to running my benchmarks.
Things more or less work out here, but there are still a few things left. I managed to break out of the weekend’s panic with exactly my own method: if something doesn’t work, look into another method — maybe that improves things. It’s typical to get stuck in one scenario and only be willing to proceed along it, and then it turns out it can be solved much more simply.
There was quite a lot of toiling here; I stayed in the interesting part of it. I stayed until 8 in the evening. Sakuma had gone home long ago. He’s fairly busy these days, with a great deal of administrative work.
Dinner
Of course, the evening can’t pass, after 8, without turning into a food hunt. Luckily, after I put my things down, I managed to reach an udon place in Tsuruma Park, where they were kind to me, showed me how I should order the food, and I got a nice big soup, full of noodles. I really love udon, though I confess I still splash quite a bit when I slurp up the hot noodles. I’m always reminded of my grandmother, who made noodles and túrós csusza in a similar way. I did mess one thing up: instead of octopus I got eggplant. There are few things I won’t eat — or simply just hate — and that’s eggplant.
In the evening the research just carried on. I found the main error. On the other side, though… well, for now more measurements are still needed, but the first results are very promising.
Photos
