taxis, toilets and physics

The jet lag is getting better-- today's haze didn't kick in until 9pm. And I'm starting to get hungry at appropriate times. I also slept until after dawn. Here is a morning photo of the view from our room.

Rupa and I visited the Tokyo National Gallery today. To get to the gallery, we got off the subway, spun around in circles and stared at a few maps, and then found our way to the park. We walked through a long beautiful park to the gallery on the other side. The park was full of people, some on bikes, and we were stampeded by a small army of four year olds in hot pink hats.

I was only able to stay at the gallery for an hour but enjoyed the historic buddist art, ceramics, and masks.


Here are a couple of my favorites.
This is a water jar for tea ceramony. The big crack is intentional. It gives the piece a "strong sense of individuality."

The ceramic they had made me feel good about my own work. It was all very interesting and appeared imperfect and somewhat chaotic. Of course, it is designed to look that way whereas my own work is accidently (and not so nicely) that way.



Some netsuke-- these are tiny and full of texture and detail.



The noh masks are full of personality.


Then I had to run and catch a taxi to the University of Tokyo. Normally I am anti-cab, preferring to walk. But the campus is about a kilometer from where we were and given Ueno's winding, narrow streets we navagated getting there, its a good thing I didn't walk-- I would've certainly gotten lost.

My taxi driver has a button that he pushed when I hailed him-- the back door opened automatically. I climbed into the lace covered back seat that reeked of menthol cigarettes. My taxi driver was wearing a suit and tie and he spoke zero English. I had a difficult time telling him to take me to the University of Tokyo and had to hand him my map and directions (which were unfortunately in English). Finally he understood and we sped away. He got a little turned around and kept pointing and talking to me in Japanese. He was of the philosophy that if he jesticulated a lot, spoke loudly and slowly, and repeated himself numerous time that I would suddenly understand him. No luck. But we managed to get to the campus.

From there I picked up a good map at the security gate and got directions to the physics building.

I hung around the High Energy Theory group for a few hours and then gave my talk. The talk went much faster than I had planned because I miscalculated a few things.

1. Everyone was very polite and refrained from asking very many questions. I'm accustomed to talks at Harvard where I get bombarded with questions with every slide and my audience gets into arguements with itself.

2. I assumed that they knew too much about the background material. Again, this is a mistake I made because my previous experiences have been at Harvard where everyone has read all the papers and many people are working on related projects.

3. I didn't make enough slides.

So, when I reached my conclusion slide after 20 minutes (instead of 50 or so), they asked me to start over and asked lots of questions with every slide. Their questions were very non-aggressive and broad so it wasn't too painful. I was mostly embarrassed. Oh well. I've learned a bit about giving guest lectures and I'm glad its all over now.

After the talk, I sat around with a few of the physicists over coffee and chatted. I found out some interesting things...

There are no women in the particle physics group at the University of Tokyo. (There were about a dozen people at my talk, all men) There was one woman a few years ago but she graduated. In fact, there are very few women in physics at all there. I guess I shouldn't be surprised but its really too bad. I am spoiled with all the women at Harvard: having them around makes the environment more comfortable.

The fish market that Rupa and I tried to go to had moved! Its in a new location that is close to the old location. Damn you, Lonely Planet.

I was pretty wiped after the talk and Rupa had had a strange Ramen experience so we layed low this evening. We took a walk around the neighborhood, Iedabachi, and ate at a chinese restaurant (yeah buns!).

I did manage to have a classic tourist mini-adventure today in the ladies room at the University of Tokyo. I went in and found this:

I had read about these in the guide book. You're supposed to face the wall and not the door. I was faced with the following question: I am about to give a seminar and I'm wearing nice wool pants. Should I take them off or should I risk some spray? In a fit of stubborness, I decided to risk the spray and kept my pants at my ankles. I got lucky (this is rare when it comes to squatting) and managed to not pee on myself and not fall over. Woohoo! When I stepped out of the stall, I peeked in the other one and saw this:

go figure.