February 1, 2019
Today is a little better than yesterday, but I am definitely still adjusting to Japan and am finding myself very homesick. This morning, I found my alien residence card, which is good because I had originally thought I lost it at the airport. We start the work day with stretching routines promptly at 9 AM. Think 80's exercise videos minus the clothing choice. I had initially thought that Japanese people always dressed in black and white professional clothing for work, as many people told me that. However, the dress code at Omron is much more casual. I was a little overdressed, and unfortunately may be for the rest of the time I am working here because I only brought nicer work clothes. I am going to stand out anyway because I am the only blonde girl working at Omron. Lorentz, a German exchange student, has lighter hair too. I haven't seen anyone else. There are about 450 people that work at this location of Omron and most are Japanese.
Today I met one of my mentors, Danni. She speaks English, which is very nice for me. Most people at work speak Japanese and will occasionally speak to me in broken English. There also are not many vegetarian options in Japan. I think finding food here will be a little more challenging than I had initially anticipated. At lunch, they put fish flakes on the broccoli, so I couldn't even eat that. I settled for a salad that I took the ham off of, yogurt, and rice. Our lunch break is from 12:15 to 1:00 PM.
I have to use a japanese keyboard. It has all the hirigana japanese characters and an option to write in the katakana characters as well. It also has english. Most of the keys are in the same spots. The only ones that are different are like the @ and : and * and characters like that. It is difficult to find them and also weird because you don`t have to press shift to get them but you do with symbols you traditionally wouldn`t have to. You use caps lock to make it type in english.
I have been working on an introductory powerpoint that I have to present next week. It basically covers personal information (family, hometown, hobbies, work experience, goals, etc). I have it mostly finished, but I don`t really know what else to add. I think I have all of Monday, except for maybe an hour to work on it, so I have no idea what I am going to do. They told me that my first project should last about two months where I will be programming in MATLAB and analyzing EEG signals to try to make machines and humans more naturally integrated. It is basically neural network research, which is honestly something I was trying to avoid because it sounded too hard. I think that we work Mondays-Fridays from 9:00 am to 5:30 pm. The nice thing is it is just a 5 minute walk to work and a 10 minute walk to the stores. We don`t get wifi for the phones at work, they only have ethernet cords to connect your computer. This makes it very apparent that I still need to figure out how I can get wifi in Japan for a decent price for my entire stay. It is a little difficult because American phones are SIM locked, so you cannot just simply use a Japanese SIM card in your phone like most countries can. Hopefully, I will figure it out soon enough.
In the evening, we went to dinner at a meat place. I was able to eat some cheese yaki, edamame, and some other food that I cannot recall the name of. Everything I tried was very good! It was pretty cool because there were a ton of people from all over the world there (Syria, Ireland, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand). I was the only one there from America. Most of them didn't know where Ohio is in the USA. It seems most foreigners only know New York, California, and Florida. They asked me a lot about politics which kinda put me on edge, but it ended up being just fine. We also talked a lot about the recent cold temperatures in Ohio and I tried to explain how to calculate Fahrenheit from Celsius to them. I had a lot of fun at dinner, and am glad I was able to start making friends. Hopefully it gets easier from now on.
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