Summary of where I visited during my two months in Tokyo and nearby location.

Once you have a chance to live in one city for two months, you will have visited so many places around the city that you might not remember them all. I am also one of those people. However, there are at least two of my friends who asked me for the recommendations for places to stay and where to visit in Tokyo once they knew that I lived there for two months. So, I thought it is a good idea to write down a summary for places that I have visited so that other people will be able to follow some of these places that I found as well. I would say that this will easily be the longest post that I have ever written so far on this blog. Feel free to skip around and find only stuffs that you are interested in. Here is the list of places that I like about Tokyo.

Place to Stay
Flaxstayinn Iidabashi: The hotel is very close to the city, and it was where I lived while I had my two-month internship in Japan. The location is good too since it’s in the middle of Tokyo and lots of subway lines went through there.

Flexstayinn Higashijujo: Here is the place where my mom live when she visited Tokyo since Flaxstayinn IIdabashi was full.

Place to go
Shinjuku: The biggest subway station in Tokyo with lots of malls and business area. Great place to get food and shopping.
      - Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building: You can go on top of this tall building for free to get the good view of Tokyo. On the nice day, you should be able to see Fuji Mountain as well.

View looking at Tokyo Tower from the top of Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building which you can go for free.

      - MK buffet: Thai famous hotpot restaurant that also has a branch in Tokyo. Good place for me since I haven’t been back to Bangkok for awhile.

Books about US Politics: Network Visualization

Network of books about US politics with its frequent copurchasing of books by the same buyer.

Now, I am working on the project at the Knowledge Lab about books and its political spectrum from conservative to liberal. And I found this publicly available dataset online, so I think it would be good for me to try to visualize this network and see the relationship between books and its copurchase.

I got this dataset from Prof. Mark Newman's personal website page of Network data (If you are interested, you can check his website as well.) He is a physics professor at University of Michigan, conducting research on the structure and function of social and information networks. According to Prof. Newmann's website, this dataset contains

A network of books about US politics published around the time of the 2004 presidential election and sold by the online bookseller Amazon.com. Edges between books represent frequent copurchasing of books by the same buyers. The network was compiled by V. Krebs and is unpublished. 

Teach For Thailand Visits Chicago

Teach for Thailand (TFT) is the project promoting Education which is inspired by Teach for America and Teach for All. Teach for Thailand itself is fairly new with only two years of official establishment. Currently, it is trying to promote the program to more motivated Thai students who are studying abroad in the United States and England. This is why they made a trip to Chicago.

The connection that I have about Teach for Thailand came from Alisa who is an undergraduate student from Brown University. I met her during my trip to Boston for spring break two years ago. She interned at Teach For Thailand last summer, and I decided to reach out to her once I know about it on the Newsfeed of Facebook. After talking with a person from TFT, I am really excited with help them while staying in the US in any way that I can. However, once I finished my interview for the Campus Leader (CL) position, I did not feel ready to add one more responsibility on top of everything that I have right now. I almost reject the offer, but then I think that no chance comes twice. If I did not take it now, I might not have the same chance again. This is a chance that I can help the Thai education which I simply only have it in my mind for the whole time while not doing anything about it. In the end, I took the chance, and my first task is to organize the TFT tour which they will come to the US to promote the program on different college campus.

Poster for the visit of Teach for Thailand in Chicago

Teach for Thailand is a two-year fellowship program for newly graduate students or motivated individuals to become a teacher in a poor neighborhood for two years while receiving educational supports and workshop for leadership to develop their personal skills. The goal is to provide schools with motivated and prepared teachers to go to the classroom and make a difference with students in that classroom while also develop their own skills, which makes this program a win-win for both the fellows who are a part of TFT and schools that these fellows go into. It is difficult to tell whether it is a successful program or not since this is only its second year, but it is good to see many people are enthusiastic about fixing the education problem and this will be a good start for more discussion about education in Thailand.

Istanbul: The Unexpected Trip from Layover

This is a kind of trip that I have never thought of until a chance comes around. Basically, I got an internship in Tokyo, Japan, so I have to buy a flight to go there from Chicago. After looking up online, I realized that two cheapest airlines at that time to fly to Tokyo is Turkish Airways and Air Canada. Of course, when I saw an opportunity to visit a new country even just for a little bit, I grab that chance immediately. I picked Turkish Airways just because I can go to Istanbul without a visa during my layover. This trip is my first layover trip to a different country where I don't know the language or anything else about it. But it was a pretty fun trip overall, and I would love to do something like this again in the future.

The first thing that I encountered during the trip to Istanbul is turkish dessert. I have no idea what it is or what it tastes like. Just because I saw lots of people were eating it, I decided to try it as well. I later learned that it is call 'Churro' which is a sweet crispy donut-like dessert. I love it from the first bite. I still wish that I have a chance to eat it again some day. Sounds like it will be a good start for my journey here in Istanbul. I forget to tell that I have to struggle at the train station for a while to figure out the best way to come to the city. It is fairly easy just to take a train to the center of the city, but the token system got me confused. Basically, you need a new token for each train that you take. No free-transfer.

Turkish sweet Churros: Great Dessert

UTRIP: How I spent my last summer of college

During the summer of 2014, I had a chance to participate in University of Tokyo Research Internship Program (UTRIP) with the financial support from Friends of UTokyo, Inc. UTRIP is an undergraduate summer research internship program with top professors for those who want to pursuing Ph.D. degree in science in the future.

Prof.Tamura's seminar on the topic of Exoplanets

I participated in the Exoplanet Lab in the Astronomy Department hosted by Prof. Motohide Tamura. The main focus of the lab is about direct imaging technique to observe several types of objects such as exoplanets and protoplanetary disks. The data mostly comes from Subaru Telescope which is the 8.2 meter telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), located at Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii. My research background is astrophysics, mainly exoplanet using transiting technique. Thus, I was really excited once I knew that I would learn this new technique, direct Imaging, to detect planets. Direct imaging planets are extraordinary because we can actually see a planet itself instead of an indirectly observed planet from technique such as transiting and radial velocity. By being able to see a planet, we can confidently say that we found an extrasolar planet and a planet does exist outside our solar system.

Firework Festival in Tokyo during Summer

This post will simply be mostly photos on two (maybe three if you count the one that I didn't wait to see the actual firework) firework festivals in Tokyo that I attended during my internship in Tokyo with the UTRIP program. There are festivals basically every weekend for the whole month of July and maybe couple more in August. I recommended everyone who has a chance to visit Tokyo during this time to attend one of the festivals. The enormous size of the events will surprise you even though they hold the events every weekend.

Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival 2014, near Tokyo Skytree

Big Reunion After Ten Years for SG in Tokyo

This is the first post from Tokyo, Japan. But it is not an usual post from the new city since this post is not about what new things I found in the city, but what old things I have forgotten during the last ten years when I left Saint Gabriel's College. 

Tanabata Festival on the 7/7, near Asakusa

It was a quick notice but four of us meet together at Asakusa for the Tanabata festival which is a festival about the story of two young people who can meet each other once a year during the 7th of the 7th month because of the separation from the Milky Way. The festival itself is interesting with all strange stuffs scattering around the festival such as Tamagoyaki (Japanese Sweet Egg Omelet) for 100 yen which was surprisingly good and people dressing in Yukata. But the main point of this post is not the festival, but about the reunion after ten years and thousands of miles away from where we met each other before.