Welcome Party!!!

On Monday it was finally the day for our welcome party at the research group!

We gathered all together in the lunch-room, and our hosts had ordered nice food :-) Sushi, Pizza, japanese fingerfood, snacks, ... My favorite was obviously the delicious sushi but the fried king crabs were not bad either. For some reason I liked dried squid as a snack, who would have guessed that? I even bought some today when I was shopping!


Even before we started eating however, the drinks were distributed... We started with good japanese Kirin beer (6%), followed by japanese Sake (14%, this time cold sake, but the amount was just equally large as last time), some japanese potato liquor (25%) and good norwegian cognac (40%)... When I say "we started...followed by" I mean that this was the order in which the beverages were poored in our cups - everything came basically at the same time before the first "kampai" - which by the way means cheers. Not to be confused with kampei however which means "bottom up" or in good old norwegian "bonski"... I did make that mistake a few times later that evening...

And as a great host, Fujii San and made sure that we did not run out of any of the four types of liquor at any time. But I have to be honest: Russians are just better at turning potatoes to drinkable alcohol than Japanese... When it comes to rice however...

Another thing I found out is that for some reason, japanese seem to be extremely fond of heat... They heated the room to 27 (!!!) degrees with the air conditioner! However, this seemed to make them gradually defrost as they became more social and talkative. I think this has to be attributed the fact that japanese are well aware of the fact that liquor reaches its maximum efficiency when consumed either warm or in an warm environment.

Anyways, we had a great party, and I finally got to meet the other postdoc, phd and master students, some of which are shown above. They all seem very nice and I am looking forward to our next party or trip to the pub :-)