My Father, My King

I had breakfast (chohshoku) in the hotel (hoteru) this morning (kesa). [Please note my roomaji are not entirely consistent as there are various possible transliterations and I'm getting them from different sources.]

Muzak to accompany breakfast as I'd expect in the UK? No, "My Father, My King" by Mogwai - 20 minutes and 21 seconds of guitars. Awesome.

As was breakfast. I had the choice of:

• continental - rolls with whipped butter from Hokkaido (delicious), pastries;
  
• Sino-English - rectangular slivers of bacon, scrambled egg with cheese(?) and mustard, slender but limp mushrooms;
  
• healthy - fruit pieces, fruit salad, muesli; and
  
• traditional - cooked fish, pickles (sunomono, made with dainty cucumbers is my favourite), rice and miso soup.
  

I went for globalisation.

Must start doing some work. I am giving a presentation this afternoon on the use of artificial intelligence for the control of quantum dynamical processes in molecules with lasers. I was expecting an audience of academics (i.e. versed in computer science and able to read technical English). I have instead the aforementioned finalists and masters students. My Japanese is almost as good as their English (actually, Japanese can be quite shy about speaking English if they have not mastered it, so they are probably a lot more advanced in English, but are too embarrassed to try, the way round this is to smile a lot). I am redoing the presentation with: less material on advanced computer science topics but with more explanation, more explanations of the chemistry, less quantum dynamics, more pictures, and kanji for technical terms.

Ja mata ne!