Ach! Over a month and a half since I've written anything!
I'm sure nobody bothers to read this anymore, but I'll write something anyway just because long untended blogs are so sad.
One and a half months, and the busiest since I came to Japan. There's been the winter holiday with my brother coming over and us going down to Kyoto and Tokyo, that was great. Weather stayed good for almost the entire two weeks (we had one day of rain) and we didn't stay still for a moment it seemed. Did most of our sightseeing on foot, to see some of the "ordinary" Japan as well as the temples and sightseeing spots. Here's a picture of Kinkakuji (that's what everybody calls it, I don't remember the official name) in Kyoto:
Classes started again on January sixth, a Monday so the first week was only four days. The Monday after that was also a national holiday (Coming of Age Day), so another four day week. I took advantage of the three day weekend to go down to Tokyo to meet a penpal from about a year back. That was lots of fun, we went to Disneyland and Ueno Zoo. I have no idea how long it's been since I went to an amusement park or a zoo, but it's been a long time so I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Going to Tokyo on local trains take a bit over seven hours, by Shinkansen it only takes a couple of hours or so but it's expensive (a bit over 10000 yen). During holidays there's a special ticket for the local trains called the "something something 18 kippu" which lets you go as much as you want for five days for about 12000 yen. And since I still had three days left on one I'd gotten before christmas I went on the slow trains. So I spent a bit over 14 hours on the train that weekend, but it was well worth it. I had Snow Crash with me, I'm going to know that book by heart pretty soon if I keep reading it.
Last week was also a four day week since they were preparing for entrance exams on Friday. That makes this week the first full week this year.
The arginine samples have arrived, but we won't start the experiment until next week since Miyamoto-san is defending his master's thesis tomorrow. But it'll be interesting to see how closely the results from our simulation actually match the experimental ones. And of course it'll be interesting to see if the equipment works at all with an amino acid. Only been used with DNA before.