A week and a half ago I spent a few days in Geneva and gave a presentation about ostree and Flatpak at the CERN Computing Seminar. I started by briefly introducing Endless to give some context of the problems we’re trying to solve and how we’re using ostree and Flatpak for that, then proceeded to talk more in detail about these technologies. In the end, there were several questions, and I was happy to learn afterwards that among the audience there were some of the people working at the CVMFS project: a software distribution service to help deploy data-processing infrastructure and tools. I don’t know the full details about the project’s implementation, but from the problems they’re trying to solve it seems like ostree (or more specifically libostree) could perhaps be used to replace part of the core, which would leverage all the niceties of using a complex Open Source project (more eyeballs looking into bugs, more testing, etc.). I also think more use-cases could be found in the organization, so I hope my talk was a small seed to help introduce these projects at CERN in the medium/long term. The presentation has been recorded if you’re interested.
Getting authorization to access CERN this time was also different, as for the first time I got an entrance pass as a member of the CERN Alumni. So I would like to thank Antonella Del Rosso for the Alumni initiative and also for allowing me to kindly borrow her EU-CH power adapter when I forgot mine at my friends’ home. In the end Antonella also interviewed me about my experience at CERN and after I left, and produced this summary if you want to check it out.
I would also like to thank Miguel Ángel Marquina of the CERN Computing Seminar for organizing the presentation and all the details around it.
Sitting by the lake with my daughter
Having spent more than 2 years in the region, it is the friends we have there that we miss the most. So it was great to meet them and old colleagues again.
My family traveled there with me and we stayed with friends from Spain, so it was funny to see our daughter (who used to play with those friends’ kids all the time when we lived there) excusing her shyness for not speaking Spanish. But after a day or two they were all successfully playing together; it’s amazing how children can get along no matter what differences or barriers they find, while adults often resort to stupid feelings and dangerous actions.
The mountains landscape is another thing we miss in Berlin and the Spring’s clear weather allowed us to fully gaze at the Jura or the Mont Blanc which should last us for another few more months. After that, I guess I’ll try to find some graffiti of mountains around Berlin 🙂
For our third day in Tokyo we were visiting Odaiba, an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. We got to the island early using the Yurikamome train, a fully automated train without drivers on board. I was surprised to see that the train does not run on rails but has wheels with tires instead (so maybe there is a better name for it than train)!
In Odaiba we went to the Sega Joypolis, a theme park by the well known games company Sega. The park has many nice attractions like a half-pipe (with a series of snowboard-like devices/wagons where two people can stand at a time), many enhanced video-games (for example a rollercoaster where we had to shoot zombies) or an experience inspired by a horror movie. This horror experience was based on the movie Sadako 3D (with a terrifying girl like the one in the Ring movie), we were taken to a dark room with a few computer screens that suddenly started malfunctioning! Our guide (speaking Japanese) tried to turn them off and had to unplug to do so but they quickly turned on again (oooohhh)! Helena and I were very tired (it was evening already) so we were not really excited by the whole scary experience and this must have been so clear in our expressions that the guide switched to English and told us: Very dangerous! Very very dangerous! Run run!
Another thing that I enjoyed seeing was that the Joypolis had many interactive installations using methods similar to the ones I was working with at the time. Check out this live hair change to make queuing less boring:
Love Helena’s air style!
The Joypolis is an indoors park and before we knew, night had fallen so we just had dinner and went back to the hotel.
No fear, Gundam’s here!
The next day we headed to Yokohama, to visit the rāmen museum and later to a town called Kamakura. I had seen the rāmen museum in some movies and I had three wrong assumptions about it: 1) it’s in Tokyo (it’s not, it is in Yokohama), 2) it’s an open air place (it’s in a basement floor) and 3) it’s a big place (it’s rather small). Still, I liked it because we learned a bit about rāmen, it is possible to try several types of it and learn from which regions it comes from, the atmosphere is good and there was a magic/juggling show going on.
Rāmen museum under a beautiful sky
We also took the chance to visit the Yokohama’s China town with its complex colors and architecture contrasting with the Japanese ones. We entered a Chinese temple and I started taking pictures as I saw no sign forbidding it. Suddenly a lady starts yelling at me, telling me to stop taking photos and basically pushed me out the temple… This also contrasted with the laid back and respectful attitude of the guards in the Japanese temples that had asked me to stop taking photos before. In my defense, after almost two weeks in Japan, I was quite used to look for signs forbidding photos but I hadn’t seen any when entering this Chinese temple because we entered through a side door and the sign was hanged outside over the main door.
After Yokohama, we went to Kamakura, a small town whose main attraction is the giant Buddha statue (daibutsu) with almost 14 meters of height. The statue is impressive and the place is quite peaceful so I definitely recommend it.
Peaceful place
That night we went back to the nice rāmen place I mentioned in the first volume of the Tokyo’s part, in Ikebukuro (I wish I could remember the name of the place…), and got back to our hotel to get ready for our last day in Tokyo.
For our last day in Tokyo, we wanted to check out the fish market but we realized that it had strict rules to visit it and we had to be there very early, so we decided to take it easy (we were tired for the almost two weeks of moving around) and just went there a bit later in the morning. Naturally, the whole frenzy fish selling was no longer taking place so we just bought a few things in some small stands there like nori sheets (they were way cheaper there than back at home) and some beans which we thought were the nice tea we had tried in a few restaurants. When we got home and tried the tea, the beans were tinier than we remembered and they looked like coffee beans (the drink also tasted a bit like very weak coffee) so we just thought that we had bought some very bad coffee. The funny thing is that one year after the trip to Japan, we moved to the Geneva area (where I am currently working at CERN) and shortly after a German PhD student named Christian started working in my office, he knows a lot about tea and Japan (even speaks the language) and he told me those beans were actually roasted barley tea (or mugi cha). Mystery solved!
After the fish market, we went to the nice district of Asakusa, to visit Sensō-ji, one of the most impressive temples in our trip. In there we did the traditional custom of giving a donation and getting a small note telling your fortune. About mine, I won’t disclose everything but among some nice things it said “Building a new horse and enlarging are both good”. No kidding!
Sensō-ji
Close to the temple, we went to a nice sushi restaurant, with a conveyor belt surrounding a chef making the sushi in real time. We had been to sushi restaurants with the conveyor belt in other places in Europe and they all followed a “flat-rate” model (pay one fixed price, eat all the sushi you want), however, in Japan the common thing is that each dish has a color which indicates its price and in the end they sum it all and you pay. Still, the sushi was great and not that expensive.
Once we finished visiting Asakusa, we headed to the Tokyo University through a nice park with an impressive pond called Shinobazu, full of waterlilies, fish, ducks and turtles.
Shinobazu pond.
The last night in Tokyo we changed again to the last hotel of the trip (Narita U-City), this one was outside of Tokyo close to the Keisei Narita Station, on the way to the airport because we figured that the next day it would be simpler and faster to get the airport from there, and being away from Tokyo it means it was also cheaper.
The next day, we started our trip early and we saw a very long queue waiting for the KLM’s desks to open. So we waited, and waited, and waited and realized that our flight was delayed… We must have waited more than 3 hours in the queue which never got smaller.
Eventually they started opening the desks but it was clear that they were very badly organized. Finally, after all that time waiting, when we got to the counter, the lady tells us that she thought our backpacks were too big for hand luggage. I replied they were actually smaller than they looked and that we traveled all the time with them. She said that we had to try to fit them in the appropriate metal frame for the matter and we could go there, check and come back to tell her the verdict. I told her that the metal thingy was out of her sight and that maybe she wanted to come with us to check, otherwise she would have to just trust me and so far, she hadn’t wanted to do that. She looked at me with an expression of “Oh! So someone could actually lie to me!?” (Japanese people, always so innocent) and followed us. The bags fit and we got our tickets!
I was worried that the plane would be so delayed that we would miss the flight from Amsterdam to Barcelona, not only because of the hassle but also because from although the flight from to Barcelona was part of our ticket, once we arrived in Barcelona, we had a flight home to Coruña which was bought independently. Luckily, once we landed in Amsterdam, some assistants were waiting for everyone who was going to Barcelona as the plane had already boarded but was waiting for the people from Tokyo. We arrived with time in Barcelona but guess what, our flight to Coruña was also delayed (but at least we didn’t miss it).
All summed up, we had been traveling for more than 24 hours and needless to say, we were dead tired. I even remembered waking up the next morning with the feeling of having slept really well like I had not in ages and thinking “it is good to be home”.
Finally I am finishing this series of articles. Since the trip took place, and I started writing its articles, almost three years passed by (!) but I got a good excuse as a lot of things happened. I have changed to a different country (and job) twice, and I am now a father, so far an incredibly rewarding, exciting and ongoing journey.
For our second day in Tokyo, August the 19th 2012, we first visited the Sony Building in the fancy district of Ginza. The building has several floors, each one with a bunch of Sony gadgets. It is not very interesting unless you’re into technology and you like Sony.
Tokyo Imperial Palace
After that, we tried to visit the Kabuki-za theater nearby but it was, unfortunately, under construction so we had lunch in a rāmen place nearby.
After lunch, we visited the Imperial Palace in the heart of Tokyo. Of course we could not enter the actual palace but just seeing the surroundings is nice, especially because I remembered the place from some documentaries I had watched.
In there, another very Japanese anecdote happened: we had stoped for a minute (it was hot as hell), and when we were already leaving, we realized we had lost our map (just a regular paper map but it had our itinerary) so we went back to the little security guard cabin to ask if they saw it and they had it! They saw it flying around, picked it up and kept it in case the owner came back 🙂
Yours truly in front of the Tokyo Imperial Palace
Tokyo Tower
Tokyo Tower The next step in our trip schedule was to visit the Tokyo Tower, and go there by foot. It seemed to be so close to the Imperial Palace in the map but with the heat and our tired feet, although it took us just about 1 hour to get there, it felt like much more.
We might have waited around 15 minutes in the line before going up. With 333 meters (2 meters more than the Eiffel Tower), the view over Tokyo was awesome and it even had a window in the floor so you can stand on it and imagine what’d happen to you if you fell 🙂
View from the Tokyo Tower
Yoyogi Park
After the Tokyo Tower, we headed to the Yoyogi Park. This park is world famous for the rockabilly style dancers performing in there but this wasn’t the only interesting thing that it had. It is very big and a lot of people were doing different activities in there, from a drums group, to lousy music bands and group gimnastics or dancing. When we were watching the rockabillies’ performing and taking their photo, there was a drunk japanese old man taking photos of western tourists, including Helena’s. Later, walking through the park, we saw how he would try to participate in every activity he passed by. He was kind of screwing the group dancing session so what did the group leaders do? Instead of telling him to go away, they kept moving the group of around 20 people away from the guy, several times. Oh, and the guy was drunk and drinking beer can after beer can but he had a bag of trash with him and kept all the cans, never littering. Gotta love Japanese education.
Rockabillies in Yoyogi Park
Roppongi Hills
The night was finished in the rich area of Roppongi Hills. It was like a fancy mall, with expensive stores, live music and restaurants here and there. We went the cheap way instead, got our food from 7-Eleven and had dinner in a nice square with chairs and tables that didn’t belong to any restaurant. Roppongi Hills
After dinner we went to the hotel, a different one than the previous couple of days. It was called Chiyoda Inn, located in Arakawa and it was a bit more expensive (about 85 €/night) but much better. The next day would be a very special one to me and any anime fan: we would visit Akihabara!
Akihabara
I have mentioned in previous articles that going to Japan was a childhood dream for me and an important part of that dream was to visit Akihabara. If you don’t know about it, Akihabara is the electronic district of Tokyo, a paradise for any video games/electronics/anime fan! As a proof of her love and patience, Helena agreed to spend the whole day in there. So basically we arrived at around 10AM and confirmed the view that I expected to find in there: massive buildings, covered in ads for video games and anime outside; inside there were usually several floors, each floor with a different theme/purpose. For example, comics stores had usually one gender or demographics per floor; including hentai for all the tastes (I will leave the details to your imagination).
I felt like a kid in Akihabara. I lost count of how many books, games, electronics and anime stores I visited that day. I especially loved to see the action figures for anime TV series I loved when I was a kid. Unfortunately those were very expensive so I didn’t buy any (around 80 € for a small one). Buildings in Akihabara
Some of the buildings’ floors were actually amusement arcades with a great variety of games, from classics like Dance Dance Revolution (in which the local players completely blew our minds with their speed and accuracy) but also more modern ones like guitar hero or some XBox dancing game using the Kinect. Helena played her favorite video game — Tekken — hitting the buttons so hard that the other players around us thought Godzilla was coming to town again. I just played some Guitar Hero clone.
In the evening we also went to a Maid Café — a café where the waitresses are dressed in traditional French maid costumes and treat customers as their “masters”. We were heading to some less expensive one that was mentioned on our guide book and found a “maid” in the street getting people to go to her café. I thought that she would take us to the one I was looking for but she took us to a different one on the other side of the block instead. So once inside the café, there was a minimum consumption policy of around 15 € — if I remember correctly — and, obviously, prices were high. We were hungry so we asked for a menu that included a drink and a piece of cake only to find that the juice we ordered was in a very small glass and the cake was okayish in size but the price was rather “justified” by the anime drawings made in topping on the dishes as you can see in the picture. The maid was “pleasing us” just when she delivered the cake and made us mimic some “kawaii” gesture and words to magically make the cake more tasty.
Only Shin-chan could save us from this ripoff!
The feeling was very strange. I love a lot of things in the Otaku culture that might seem strange to people but maid cafés is not one of them.
In the end of the day, we bought some souvenirs for our family (I bought a Japanese whiskey bottle for my father which was not expensive at all but was really good!) and went back to the hotel but our geek journey wasn’t finished for the next day we would visit Odaiba but that’s a story for another day.
