Kelly Brock

Greetings from Japan

Kelly writes:
I'm a rising junior concentrating in Engineering Sciences at Harvard, and this summer I have the epic opportunity to spend 10 weeks in Yokohama, Japan as an intern at the RIKEN Center for Allergy and Immunology.  I am working in a lab focusing on single cell analysis, which means I have access to incredible wet-lab techniques and sensitive fluorescent microscopes.  I don't think it's possible to describe how excited I am about being here!  I remember watching a Sesame Street special on Japan as a kid, and ever since then I've been fascinated by everything Japanese from anime to Pocky to sushi. 

Tokyo is 13 hours ahead of the East Coast, which means I've unintentionally been waking up around 6 A.M.  For someone who normally prefers going to bed in the early morning, the whole getting-up-at-the-crack-of-dawn thing is fairly disconcerting.  However, my poor confused internal clock is actually a blessing, because I've gotten to see the sun rise over the city from my little apartment at the Yokohama International Student House. 

The day after I arrived, the other two undergraduates working at RIKEN and I went out with several lab coworkers to a traditional Japanese restaurant.  Although sometimes I didn't really know what I was eating, everything was very fresh and very, very good.  When I say fresh, I mean fresh - the restaurant killed the fish in the back, left on the head and tail, sliced the meat, and brought it out to our table minutes later.  So much sashimi!  Oysters, chicken tempura, seaweed, and noodles were also on the menu, along with other dishes that I couldn't decipher.  After all the kanpai's and toasts, we left full, happy, and ready to face the rest of the week.

In other news, I have been extremely surprised by two things:  the vending machines and the toilets.  When I walk to work, I pass about 30 vending machines selling everything from cold and hot coffee to grapefruit beer.  I'm going into Tokyo later today (Saturday), so who knows what I'll see there?  The toilets are also pretty amazing.  I've seen ones that play music, have bidet functions, are self-warming, and yesterday I finally saw my first squat toilet.  The downside to the, er, myriad toilet options is that pictures of them now outnumber my other, more interesting pictures of restaurants and shrines.  I'm going to try to remedy this problem by going into Tokyo in a few minutes, which is theoretically half an hour away.  Thanks for reading!