My office

Hi everybody,

I am waiting until the weather becomes more sunny to make a nice photo of my balcony, so this week I will show you my office. The NIMS complex hat a big central building where the conference, seminar and meeting rooms can be found. There is also a cafeteria-canteen, some laboratories (but not the labs where I will work) and the offices. This main building hat eight floors and in the last one you can find my small place. I share the room with two Indians, two Chinese and two to four Japanese (they are never all simultaneously in the room!). They are very friendly. I show you here one photo that was made when there was nobody on the room, my chair and my desk are the first to see on the right.

Since we are in the eighth floor, we have a good overview of a big part of the town. In the photo on the right, in the background, you can see the mountains which border Tsukuba in the northwest side. The highest with the two peaks is the Tsukuba mount 筑波山. It is around 900m high and its nonvolcanic origin permits it to have a lush vegetation. This mountain gives the name to the city where I am living. It is quite famous in Japan, a place of beautiful parks and temples, for sure you will hear again from it, or bettern to say read from it ;-).

Coming back to the views, in the photo one can also observe a part of Tsukuba city, with normal houses, sometimes even with traditional japanese style, mixed with other modern block of flats and unidentifiable cubicles. In the next picture, oriented to the west, we can see just in face a Toyota cardealer, behind it a school and at the back what we could say that is the center of the city. At the end, there is a rocket which belongs to a science museum, and behind it is the University of Tsukuba. Actually, if we want to define the city in one word, we could use the adjective: ugly. Tsukuba has a nice light and many advantages but it is not really charming. Ok, lets finish the post about my office. One of the things that I prefer from my room is that one does not notice that it is becoming darker outside when the night arrives, and this is because the window converts itself... ... in a mirrow.

A hug.