Tsukuba-Dooba-Doo

The morning of departure I awoke at about 4:00 am, which means I got a whopping 1 hour of sleep during the night. Although it was an early rise out of bed, the Haines' and Walker's still managed to be late to the El Paso Airport with hardly enough time to check our bags and get on the flight. In retrospect, it probably made saying goodbye to Katie easier since we didn't have very much time to cry with each other....but we still cried...because that's what we do.

The 15 hours of flying was fairly lacking in adventure as I was able to catch up on all manners of movies and TV, but not sleep...mistake. After arriving in Narita, Matt and were welcomed with about 2 hours of standing in a gigantic blob of people trying to go through Japanese Immigration in a series of poorly ventilated room.

Following our 2 hour bus ride to Tsukuba from Narita, we met with Chihiro. She has been our main contact throughout this whole process so it was really great finally meeting her. We had an amazing dinner at a restaurant by the bus station and was taken to our apartment, the Ninomiya House. After over 24 hours of traveling with about 3.5 hours of sleep within 48 hours....I called it a night.

-Seth

Hello everyone,

As I (Seth) am typing, it is 1:33 am on Saturday the 27th a.k.a "my departure day for Japan." Katie and I felt it would be beneficial to start our year long blog on the night before the flight in order to document this experience from the beginning.

Currently, I have about 150 lbs of cargo packed and ready to go. Amazing how your whole world can be so condensed into a couple of bags, isn't it? I would have to say the most enjoyable part of packing was vacuuming the air out of my space saver bags. Quite frankly, those things are incredible! I fit almost my entire closet into 5 of those bags.

This past week has been totally bananas! Everyday was filled with day trips (see the White Sands picture at bottom), helping out friends, and saying farewell to some fantastic people. Of course, however, my number one priority was trying to love on Katie as much as possible. For those that may not know, Katie is staying behind in Las Cruces to finish up the semester at NMSU. She will be joining me in Tsukuba (pronounced "Scuba") at the end of May.

Perhaps a little bit of background on why I'm going would be nice, no? I will be doing research for one year at the International Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). My research topic is "Separation Flow Control by using a Dielectric Discharge Barrier Plasma Actuator." Without getting too technical, let me just say that it could potentially help wind turbine perform better at low wind speeds.

Whelp....I need to wake up in about 2 hours to catch my flight so I'm going to stop here. I will probably post something tomorrow night as I travel half way across the world.

Sayonara,

Seth and Katie