With only a few days left until I leave, things are getting hectic. Deciding what to take with me for the whole year is surprisingly hard, even with a quite generous 30 kg weight limit. I hope it all fits into my suitcases! My phone is saying there’s only three days left until my “trip” to Tokyo (courtesy of Google Now). Heh, I wouldn’t call it a trip, Google, but it beats calling it a vacation.

I haven’t had a lot of time to think about Vulcanus this summer. We had to study some Japanese in advance to prepare us for studying in Japan, and even had a couple of live Skype sessions with our future teachers. My teacher was really nice and cheerful and gave a wonderful first impression of what studying there will be like. We won’t actually use any English in classes at all, which will be a very nice change. There’s a video that explains the method in detail and it’s quite impressive, I’m really looking forward to learning a new language in a completely different way.

The other, more time-consuming thing I was participating in was Google Summer of Code, which is a Google-funded programme where university students from all over the world work on various open-source projects and get a bit of compensation for it. I worked with my faculty’s laboratory for bioinformatics, on a project called Orange. It’s a visual programming tool for machine learning and a really good learning tool for beginners. What I was working on doesn’t have any fancy results, but those versed in programming likely wouldn’t mind checking out this Godzilla of a pull request. Working on it was an extremely fulfilling experience and I would encourage anyone in the position to apply to do so. You not only get (fairly well) compensated for your work, but are also mentored through participating in a potentially very large project, which is a must-have learning experience.

With that bit of shameless self-promotion out of the way, let’s see what’s in store in the next few days. Flying out on Tuesday and transferring through Dubai, I’ll have about 16 hours of flight time until I arrive at Narita, Japan’s second busiest airport. From there, a train ride will bring us to a hotel the Centre has, once again, kindly arranged for us. The next day, there’s a morning meeting where we’ll discuss who knows what, but it’ll probably pretty important, and we’ll get to meet company representatives and Vulcanus’ Japanese team. After that, I presume we’re going to our new homes—I’ll be staying in an apartment about a half hour’s train ride away from school.

I don’t know what the internet situation will be in Japan, so it may be a while before I post anything new. Let’s hope that gets sorted out soon, so I can finally post some interesting pictures instead of multiple subsequent walls of texts. Here’s a picture of some yen to tide you over.

See you next time!