Spring is here!

The Sakura (cherry blossom) has begun! And thus starts the most beautiful time of the year in Japan. The whole city is talking about nothing else but Hanami, a much-loved Japanese activity which basically involves two elements. Sakura and booze. Whilst filling oneself with liquor, one gazes at the beauty of sakura trees and ponder on the meaning of life while quoting classical Japanese poetry. Ok maybe the last part not so much, it's basically just the boozing and looking at blossom. But once you look at the pictures below, you see what all the fuss is about. It is absolutely stunning and Tokyo has a pinkish hue.

For the rest things are going well. I've integrated well at Canon and I've been working on quite useful and rewarding things lately which means I'm moving up in Canon-society (the first weeks were a bit like 'robert here go stare at these numbers for the whole day while we have meetings all day'). I'm having fun and my collegues are very relaxed and have all worked at at least two continents and know how the world works. Also, I've been strategically forcing my collegues to speak as much japanese to me as possible, which is sometimes hard since their English is pretty good. But sometimes for the sake of content we sometimes still switch to English, which is fine as it's still a bit hard for me to understand processes of 'static electricity loaded onto paper when exposed to laser beams and then attract negatively-loaded toner which is then tranferred via conveyor belts and finally fixed with ceramic heaters etc etc.' in Japanese. I know, I've let you all down.

For the rest it's all a matter of getting used to the strictness of the work environment. Start 8.15 and when the big-ben bell sounds through the speaker at exactly 8.30, the colleagues around me stop talking and do not communicate until lunch. After lunch, same bell, same story. And walking around or getting coffee is not really appreciated unless you are already on the way to do really essential things such as going to the toilet, or the copier. Culture shock, as in holland the most interesting gossip is told around coffee machines whenever someone feels like spilling their guts. For the rest, interesting people here. The IT-guy came up to my desk at Canon last week and confessed to me that his 5-day work week at Canon was just a 'side job'. His real job was being a magician during weekends. He proved it to me by doing a cool trick with merely two elastic bands.
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Being a good samaritan, the rest of the week is spent partying and hanging around in parks listening to indie bands, or tanning at artifical beaches, watching irish st. patrick day parades with Japanese in leprichaun outfits, drinking chili-pepper soaked vodkas at small bars, ordering unidentified things on menu's on a daily basis, going to ghibli museum, being abducted by rich chinese women at naka-meguro who want to be my tour guide, going for ice-cream at Ice-cream city near Piazza Maccheroni (a kitch plastic indoor version of Rome's Piazza Navona).

Will try to keep out of trouble!
Robert

At the extremely-popular-hard-to-get-tickets Ghibli Museum with my Japanese friends I met back in Beijing

Evenings in Tokyo: one of the memorable dinners with my JPP-buddies

Non-leprechauns were also allowed to show their stuff at the yearly St Patricks day parade