1st Presentation Day

Today is "seminar" day, the 2nd one I'm attending - and the 1st time I'm presenting in.  I am to talk about my previous research work (i.e. my master's thesis) and to give a little personal background about myself.  I was not able to check how long I took but it was more than 25 minutes!  Generally they were lax about the time because this time around, there were just 4 of us presentors, versus 7 previously, and the Professor did not have any meetings to run to.  Actually the Professor asked a lot of questions, at least to the other presentors, 2 new PhD students like myself, both from India, and one short-term fellowship researcher from Italy but taking her master's in New York.  My presentation went quite well, I think.  I liked the comments and questions asked.  Prayers do really work. :-)  Anyways, maybe it also helped that I showed the Katakana and Kanji forms of my name on my very first slide:

ロンジ  アキノ being Katakana for "ron-ji a-ki-no," and

秋野 being Kanji for "akino," which means "autumn field."  I like!

Kanji are like Chinese-style characters, each representing one word, but usually many Japanese words as well as names would be compound words, such as "akino," represented by two Kanji characters.  Katakana characters represent one syllable each, except for the one that represents "n," and are used for foreign or borrowed words.  Hiragana characters meanwhile are similar to Katakana but they are used for Japanese words with an equivalent Kanji; they are used to teach the Japanese language to young Japanese children as well to foreigners starting to learn the Japanese language.

I tried looking for Kanji for "ronji," and I found one for "ron," which means "discussion," or "theory."  Can't find a suitable one for "ji" that should relate to "discussion" in time for my submission of my presentation, so I did not write any Kanji for "ronji."  Anyway, I found one now (based on one dictionary) for "ji," which means "love" as a noun, or "be affectionate" as a verb.  So here's "ron-ji":

論慈

So, my full name now, Japanese style is: 論慈 秋野.  Cool! :-)

Anyways, for lunch, I had cafeteria food.  Did i say that already?  I took a couple of dishes that I have tried before.  I should take a picture of them next time.  I can't take photos quickly, because my phone, being on Windows Mobile, has a big problem - or have I said this already?  It has around 7Gb free internal memory and 7Gb free external memory (micro-SD card), and yet its camera doesn't work because "Camera requires 5Mb."  Don't buy anything with Windows Mobile.  They will solve this soon, but at the cost of many of us who own already such phones.  And they probably did not plan to solve this problem soon unless somebody told on them!  Anyways...

For dinner I went to the supermarket at Atsugi Trellis, hoping to catch some late night discounted food, but alas, the ones with discounts don't look too yummy.  I ended up with buying sushi, and...  pizza! :-D  Bacon and corn pizza.  Truly un-Italian.  :-D  Anyways, the sushi I bought this time around is half as cheap compared to that one I bought a week ago, and I noticed that the difference was that in the more expensive one from last week, there were to kinds of sushi that had some kind of roe in them.  One is an orange "sago"- or tapioca-looking roe, and the other is like yellow-brownish gooey stuff.  Yummy though, for me.  I love sushi.  And I love pizza, nevermind the bacon and corn toppings.  Bacon is always yummy.  Sushi and pizza in one meal.  Yum.  I was thinking I should have bought Coke, but nah, it's a good thing that I didn't.

I went up to the 100-yen store, but they were already closing!  I didn't know they closed shop at 8pm.  I had a list of things to buy, but time was just too short.

At the supermarket, I also bought milk - 3 1L cartons!  Because they were on sale, only 98 yen, or around 44 pesos each!  Imagine that, something other than electronics that is cheaper here than in the Philippines.  I wonder if I could live on milk alone.  Haha.  I also bought an orange juice carton, and a "mango blend" 1L carton.  I tried the mango, and well, it's not like the mangoes we have from the Philippines.  But anyways, it's still mango, and I love mango.

Wow, the title of this post is now inappropriate.  But it is what it is.  Ja mata. :-)