Hello ecebloggers,

Here’s another post about Jamaica

Jamaicans are very proud with their high schools. In the 60’s Jamaica didn’t have as many high schools as it has today. Students from different parishes (parish is like a province, Jamaica has 14 parishes) were given a choice to go to two or three high schools. As our taxi driver told us the story, he himself had to take an hour and a half ride by bus to get to the school. He’s from a Hanover parish and there are two of the oldest and most respected high schools on the island: Rusea’s (in the picture below) and Manning’s.

The school was build in 1777 after Martin Rusea, a French refugee, left gracefully all of his land (in his will dated July 23rd, 1974) for a free school to be built. The traditional colors of the Rusea’s high school are yellow, blue and green. Originally this school could admit roughly 100 students per year. Over the time the need for higher education in Jamaica forced the school to expand and now it has two campuses and admits more students. I was surprised when I heard that this high school was founded in 1777 (see picture below).

Students who graduate from this school are very respected on the island because it’s not easy to get in. Usually they continue their education.

Rusea’s High School gave one very famous and world wide known athlete: Marlene Ottey (in the picture below).

In the list of all time athletes Merlene Ottey is ranked fourth in 100 meter track and third in 200 meter track.

She holds the record for being the oldest track medalist ever and for winning the most women’s World Championship medals (14). Because of her achievements she is called “Queen of the Track”.

That’s all from Jamaica, mon.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

Hello ecebloggers,

As some of you may know my wife and I were on a two week vacation in Negril, Jamaica. This beautiful island has many things to offer: sea, landscape, cuisine, culture… There isn’t a person in the world who hasn’t heard of Bob Marley and The Wailers. Although there’s a lot to write about Jamaica (tourism, music, cuisine…) I’m gonna write about something else that caught my attention.

Because of high poverty people struggle to survive day by day (but they still keep smiling:) ). In such a world some thing’s that we take for granted, like electricity, are luxury and not all the people can afford it. The high price of electricity comes from the main source to generate it: oil.

But people need electricity in their everyday lives, so they get it for “free” (see pictures below).

All the connections, except maybe two, are illegal, or “free”. If you are in a touristic place, like Negril, Ocho Rios or Montego Bay you wouldn’t see these so often. But if you go inside the country these connections are common. Besides being illegal, these connections add additional weight to the pole and create danger for the surrounding area. When we were traveling in the country one of the poles crashed on the road. Luckly nobody was there.

Jamaica is loosing a lot of money because of the illegal electrical connections. Their government is trying to reach to the people and address the problem (see picture below).

These billboards can be seen throughout the country. In order to solve this problem Jamaican government is making a lot of effort to lower the cost of electricity by making their system more efficient and using different fuel to produce electricity.

I hope that Jamaica will find a solution for the problem.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic

Zorana and I just got back from a fun trip to Taiwan.  Zorana was invited to speak at the Psychology of Creativity Conference at Taiwan National Normal University, and they paid her ticket and a honorarium.   We decided to turn it into a vacation as well, so we booked a ticket for me too, and we spent two weeks there.   I will leave it to Zorana to describe the conference, which was a rather interesting cross-cultural experience in its own right.    You can check out our slideshow at http://picasaweb.google.com/zivcevic/Taiwan_jmp/photo#s5211542192009555298 — just click the link labeled slideshow on the right of the page.

The trip was wonderful.   I was not prepared for how interesting Taiwan was — I had really no image of it in my head.  It is fizzing with energy, entrepreneurial and otherwise.   Everybody is very helpful, and tries hard to help you, even if they do not have a word of English.    You are never more than a few blocks from a little street side food shop, in which they serve their specialty on rice or noodles.   They will show you what they have, or mime the animal (fish and chicken are easy to get, but pork is a bit harder).   There are little temples everywhere, and several grand ones in every big town, and many big ones in the big cities.  Each is dedicated to one or two or more deities or deified people (it’s complicated and ecumenical — see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Taiwan).

In many ways the country combines the best part of traveling in a developing and developed country — the food and lodging are quite reasonable (Dinner in a street side restaurant, about 5$.  Mediocre hotel, but with a bathroom and AC, 30$.  Very nice hotel, 50$ a night).   Every place is well staffed by competent people, even little tea-shops in the mountains, and they are all very flexible with clueless foreigners — often they just guessed what we wanted, and were nearly always correct.   One of the things is that it is a much richer country than I expected.  It is about twice as wealthy as Croatia, and many people have been tourists, so they know what that is like.  We saw very few western tourists, and nearly everything is geared to local tourism.   And of course, the roads, subway, airport and most other infrastructure is brand new and excellent.

The language barrier is real — but much more in the written than the verbal.   Everyone is supposed to have studied English, but it is only the last few years that they have actually practiced any conversation.  English is a BIG thing, so there is often a panic reaction anytime they need to speak it.   Often you will see the entire restaurant staff huddle, and nominate the youngest one to be the designated speaker.   But you can always work it out, and they are good at working with you.  (Every little kid says “Hi” and “bye-bye”, and parents often push their kids to practice English with you, to the kids’ terror).    But not being able to interpret the ideograms quickly can be a chore, especially when driving.   You can memorize the characters for your hotel or road, but that is hard to do quickly.  Many signs have roman transliterations on them, but they are often much smaller then the main text.  Also, there are several different ways to go from Chinese characters to the Roman alphabet, and Taiwan uses all three main ones with wild abandon.   You can usually sort it out if you say them out loud with a fake accent (sounds corny, but it works).   If you look at a map of the Alishan forests, from our mountain trip, you can spot our two routes — 159-flyswatter and 162-flyswatter (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=alishan,+taiwan&ie=UTF8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&ll=23.481826,120.696487&spn=0.167837,0.211143&t=h&z=12).  The written English is often a bit odd — see the examples in our slides.   But it is most often understandable and often a bit entertaining.

We started out with a few days in Taipei, the capital, enjoying the temples and food and the excellent museums — check out the world class National Palace Museum (http://www.npm.gov.tw/en/collection/selections_01.htm).   We then traveled down to Lugang, and old and well preserved port city to enjoy the old style architecture that has mostly been obliterated elsewhere.  After that we went to the mountains, to enjoy the spectacular scenery of rugged mountains and tea plantations (and many nice tea shops and ceremonies).   There we saw abundant fireflies, flowers, squirrels, friendly dogs and a monkey!  The landscape really does look like Chinese landscape painting.  Then we returned to the coastal plane and the old capital of Tainan, where there were many nice temples, including our favorite, the Confucian temple (predictable, that).  We then drove back to Taipei, and took the subway to the mountains, hot springs, night markets, food courts and more museums.  Then we flew back.

We highly recommend Taiwan — a bit off the beaten path, but fun and easy and interesting.

So check it out in our pictures –  http://picasaweb.google.com/zivcevic/Taiwan_jmp/photo#s5211542192009555298

Cheers,
Jamie & Zorana

Another successful conference is over. This time professor Andrew Kun, Tim Paek of Microsoft Research, and I had a paper at Interspeech 2007 which took place in Antwerp, Belgium from 27^th to 31^st of August.
The conference was very well organized, and a lot of people from all over the world attended it. We saw many interesting lectures and papers. This picture will show how crowded it was during one of the receptions. Almost every day after the lectures and poster presentations were over, the hosts organized receptions with famous Belgian beer (and less-famous wine) tasting, which I think many people enjoyed very much.

Our paper was scheduled for a poster presentation on the third day of the conference. In our paper we investigated the influence of speech recognizer accuracy, dialog repair, and press-to-talk (PTT) button usage on driving performance. Our results showed two important effects. First, there is a statistically significant influence of low speech recognizer accuracy on steering wheel angle variance. Second, the interaction between low speech recognizer accuracy and PTT button usage has a significant influence on lane position variance. We had a chance to talk to many people who were interested in our poster and gave us some good ideas and suggestions.
We also had enough time to explore Antwerp and the surroundings. Antwerp is a nice city with plenty of museums and sightseeing areas. One of the museums that we visited is the house of the famous Belgian painter Paul Rubens, which is shown in the next picture. Paul Rubens himself designed the house and inside we could see many of his paintings.

One day we also went to Brussels, which is only 45 minutes from Antwerp by train. Although we saw many interesting things over there as well, one of the most exciting was the Atomium, shown below. It was built for the World’s Fair in 1958 and represents a crystal molecule of metal. It looks very big from the outside but it is even bigger from the inside. We went to the highest ball where we had a beautiful view of Brussels.

This was the biggest conference I have attended so far. We had a chance to meet a lot of people in our research area and exchange ideas with them which was a valuable experience. Last, but not the least, we enjoyed a lot of famous Belgian beer and chocolate! So, I hope everybody will get a chance to go and visit Belgium and enjoy it as I did.

Zeljko Medenica

Andrew Kun have already made a post with the description of SIGdial 2007. Here I would like to mention my experience as a presenter. I had a presentation on the second day of the workshops (the event was two days long). On the first day I checked if I can use their computer for my presentation. That computer did not have PowerPoint 2007, hence I decided to use Andrew’s laptop. I hooked the laptop and checked if it works. I repeated this procedure a few times to make sure that everything did work. When the time of my presentation came I hooked up the laptop and… everything worked just fine. I started my talk and at the middle of the presentation I realized that my slides were not the latest slides that I had. They were good slides but I already had an improved version… Well, I finished the talk with what I had and I doubt people realized what had happened. In the feature though I will put a version number of my slides on the first slide. The first half of the presentation was not changed and when I was testing the laptop I did not pay enough attention to the last slides and hence I did not notice what they actually contained. In retrospect I realize that I’ve heard a lot of stories about having troubles with hardware, but I did not hear any stories about using improper versions of presetnations. Now I know better.

Hello readers!

I come to you with a post on my travels in Hungary. This summer I had the opportunity to vacation there. For those of you wishing for a change of scenery from UNH, I suggest you take advantage of the exchange program offered by UNH to go visit BUTE (Budapest University of Technology and Economics). The program is perfectly compatible with your studies at UNH so your graduation won’t be delayed by going. The professors are really good there, and everything is taught in english so you won’t have to learn hungarian. You do have the option of taking some culture classes to learn about life for the natives here.

You can see in these pictures the campus (click to enlarge). It is located along the Danube river. The “K” building, as it’s called is the main building of the university. It is where a lot of the courses are held for the Hungarian students.

“R” building is essentially a giant cluster building. The third and fourth floors are filled with only clusters of computers. There are computer monitors in the halls displaying which systems are in use, reserved, or otherwise unavailable.

On the left is the view of the outside of the ECE building, basically the equivalent of Kingsbury at UNH. It is a very new building, and air conditioned. This other building is right outside the ECE building, in it you can order all sorts of freshly cooked food and drinks between your classes. This is not the only one, there is one basically on every street. Food is relatively cheap in Hungary.

Across the Danube on the other side, you can see the Parliament building, the “White House” of Hungary. It contains the crown and accessories that the king of Hungary used to wear. You can take a tour inside during the summer at specific times when tours start. Very worthwhile trip. Hungary is also in the middle of Europe, and you can travel to other countries very easily on the weekends. Not like Hungary doesn’t have anything to offer, but while abroad, you might as well step outside the borders to see what surrounding countries have. BUTE offers lots of small weekend trips to many places in Europe for a very reasonable price.
Hope you grasp this wonderfull opportunity, even I have and I was born there!

András Fekete

It was great to showcase my work at Pervasive 2007, but it was even better being able to see the work that others have done in the field. An example of a paper that I found really interesting was given the best conference paper award and was entitled Shake well before use: Authentication based on Accelerometer Data. The paper, written by Rene Mayrhofer and Hans Gellersen of Lancaster University UK, presented a very simple and elegant solution for authenticating small blue tooth devices. Normally for private key encryption to occur it is necessary to enter in a key/password into each device. An example of this is WEP encryption. However, just like with WEP it can be very cumbersome to enter in these private keys. The paper suggested a method of generating private keys based on accelerometer data generated when a user shakes the two devices in their hand. In a real life application you can imagine picking up a cell phone and Bluetooth headset, giving them a quick shake, and immediately begin using them without any additional configuration. I was impressed at how great an idea this was and how effectively it was researched and presented at the conference.

There several other papers that others may want to check out. If you go to the papers section of the Pervasive website, you can check out for yourself what was presented. Googling the titles will sometimes bring up a PDF version that you can read, or for those of you at UNH, I have the conference proceedings that anybody is welcome to borrow.

Probably my favorite part of my trip to Toronto was the exposure to other cultures. It is not that Toronto is very different from American cities like Boston, but that the conference brought together people from around the globe. Beyond hearing the speakers from other countries, I had the opportunity to talk to people from Germany, Norway, Japan, Denmark, and Scotland as well as other regions of the United States such as New Mexico and Colorado. It was great to hear their views of my work and country, and it was great to learn about their work and countries as well.

Toronto also claims to be a multicultural city and one way I got to experience this was through food. I was happy to be able to brush up on my chopsticks skills (which were/are in dire need of practice) as I went to Japanese sushi, Chinese/Thai fusion, and Dim Sum Chinese restaurants. I also tasted some of the local flavor at a great French/Québécoise restaurant, and visited a small vineyard to taste some wine, including ice wine.

There isn’t much else to say about my experience of other cultures simply because it is such a subjective experience. However, due to this fact I really encourage anyone that travels to try to experience as much of other cultures as possible. This may involve making yourself uncomfortable, such as trying new foods or struggling with language barriers, but it is worth it. I actually have a very introverted personality. For those who are unfamiliar with this term, it doesn’t mean that I am uncomfortable in social situations or even that I dislike talking with people, but rather that it takes a great deal of energy for me to socialize. My point being that it would have been much easier for me to retreat to my hotel room and watch TV. However, I didn’t want the opportunity to pass me by and I am glad that I didn’t.

I am attending the Fully Networked Car workshop in Geneva and this workshop is collocated with the 2007 Geneva Auto Show. I have to say that the auto show is a flashy affair! The car companies exhibiting here spared no expense or effort to present their products. Many have giant booths with custom built platforms, a multitude of shiny vehicles that are dusted and polished every few minutes, stage lighting that makes camera flash unnecessary in this indoor environment and (not politically correct, but still a fact of life) booth babes.

Many car companies are addressing global climate change head on. For example, all around Geneva one can see VW company cars displaying the (relatively small) amount of CO2 these cars release into the atmosphere. I also saw a hydrogen fueled car, a natural gas fueled car, small city cars with excellent gas mileage, as well as many hybrid cars, for example by Honda:

In general, small cars are very common in Europe and this is something that I would like to see more of in the US. Full disclosure: my wife and I drive a Ford Focus and a VW Jetta.

I was interested in the use of speech input in cars. I saw three manufacturers who offer speech input in their cars: Jaguar, BMW and Mercedes. All have a press-to-talk (PTT) button which is used to signal to the car the beginning of speech however the end of speech is detected by the car (not by the release of the PTT button as for example in the Project54 system). See, for example, a picture of the Mercedes S-class steering wheel with a PTT button:

Demonstrations of speech technology were not available. In fact the very helpful representatives of the car manufacturers that I talked to clearly did not expect questions about speech input. The person at Jaguar was confused when he tried to change the input/output language of his system. The system was originally set to understand and respond in German. He tried to switch it to English but the system didn’t want to cooperate. His colleague blamed the problems on a low battery in the car (why not connect the car to a charger?). The person showing me the S-class Mercedes had to ask where the microphone is in the car and the person who helped out only pointed out a general area. And I only have my own guess as to where the microphone is in the BMW.

Andrew Kun

The famous “Jet d’eau” of Geneva

I’m writing from Geneva, Switzerland where I’m attending the Fully Networked Car Workshop and Exhibition. The workshop is organized by the ITU and its aim is to bring together telecommunications and automotive companies in a discussion about creating the networked car of tomorrow. The workshop is collocated with the 2007 Geneva Auto Show. Turnout is excellent – there are around 350 registered participants.

When people talk about a “networked car” they mean both networking devices within a car and networking the car to other cars or to an external infrastructure. This is of course what the Project54 effort addresses and why I was interested in giving a presentation at the workshop.

Very appropriately, I experienced the state-of-the-art in car-to-car communication immediately on arriving in Geneva. My wife and I took a taxi from the airport. As the taxi was flying through the city (we were glad we had seatbelts) another car cut us off. Our taxi driver swerved and stepped on the brake avoiding a collision. This is when the car-to-car communication commenced. Our cabbie rolled down his window and started yelling at the driver of the other car (he also made some hand gestures). The other driver yelled back and this went on for about 30 seconds at which point the communication link was broken and we sped off.

One interesting prediction I heard at the workshop is that cars will become “docking ports.” Gone will be the CD players, radios, etc. Instead cars will provide infrastructure for aftermarket devices (makes you think of Project54). An example of a device that was once predicted to be in many cars that’s now nowhere to be found: the car phone.

Andrew Kun

reflections on 2006 Visit to TOkyo, Japan

Background

From May 2006 to January 2007, I spent nine months living in Tokyo as I served as a visiting Professor at the Center for Collaborative Research, the University of Tokyo (UT for hereafter) in Tokyo, Japan. I had the opportunity to visit because of a collaborative relationship between UT Intelligent Transportation System Center (CCR-ITS) and my associated institution, California PATH, www.path.berkeley.edu, at the University of California at Berkeley (UCB). It was a great and rewarding experience for me, as I made many trips to Japan before and have always been fascinated by many aspects of the Japanese society.

UT has a few campuses scattered around the Tokyo metropolitan area. CCR-ITS is located at the Komaba (駒場) campus, which is near Shibuya (渋谷) and is in the southwestern portion of central Tokyo, while the main campus of UT, Hongo (本郷) campus, is located in the northern part of central Tokyo. I spent most of my time in Komaba, with only a few chances to give lectures and visit Hongo. The experience that I share below therefore may be biased due to the locality of the areas that I stayed.

First of all, I have to say that being a resident for nine months is totally different from being a tourist as I was before. I had made almost 20 trips, each time for one week or so, to Japan for personal and business purposes before. During this long stay, I was able to understand and appreciate much more deeply about the social and cultural characteristics of Japan.

Lodging

The very first thing that Americans need to adjust to the life in Japan is the small living space.

During the span of the nine-month stay, I stayed in three different lodging facilities. Originally, UT tried to make an arrangement at a university lodge room at Komaba for me, which would be most convenient because it is right on the campus. However, the room is very small and the room size is about 180 sq-ft (17 m²) for faculty and 145 sq-ft (13 m²) for students. The room has a fold-up bed, a desk, and a mini kitchen and can fit barely anything else. As I was planning to have my wife staying with me for extensive periods, I asked UT to make other arrangements.

The first place that I stayed after my arrival was a temporarily one for the first 10 days only, before the next more permanent one became available. Because I was staying for a relatively short period, UT helped me lease these so-called monthly mansions. In Japan, the word “mansion” is used for more modern apartments in concrete buildings, while “apartment” refers to older units in conventional wooden structures. There is a special twist in the typical mansion or apartment rental agreements in Japan. The lease is usually for at least one year or two years. Besides the deposit (most typically an amount equal to 2-month rents), there is a gratitude fee (also typically 2 months of rents) that the renter needs to pay to the landlord when the contract is signed. The deposit is returned wholly or partially when the renter moves out, but the gratitude fee is a front-end payment that stays with the landlord. Therefore, unless there is a longer-term plan or commitment to stay in one place, it will not be economical to sign the lease. For this reason, UT suggested and made arrangements for a different option, the monthly mansions. Unlike long-term rental units that are usually unfurnished, monthly mansions are fully equipped with bed, refrigerator, television, kitchen range, rice cooker, basic utensils, vacuum machine, and washer. Of course, the rents for monthly mansions are much higher but it is a convenient option for short-term dwellers.

As for the price of apartments or mansions, it depends heavily on the location and the type of places one desires to live in. The most important factors in determining the rents include transportation ease, room size, neighborhood, and the building facilities. People care most about the daily use of transportation, so the deciding factors are the walking distance to the train station, and the possibility to use multiple subways lines or the number of transfers needed for one to get to school or work.

The students that I came into contact with at UT typically have to pay a monthly rent of 50,000 to 65,000 yen for a one-room apartment or mansion. For family types of room, it will be approximately be 1.5 to 2 times higher for larger space and/or newer buildings. The range of furnished monthly mansion rent is quite wide, but it will cost approximately 150,000 to 200,000 yen for two-person’s monthly accommodation. The rent for monthly mansions includes a daily utility charge of about 650-1000 yen. The renter will also be asked to pay an up-front cleaning fee of 10,000 to 35,000 yen, depending on the length of the stay. An internet search with the key words of “monthly mansion & Tokyo” will provide many links to browse through, if anyone is interested and able to read Japanese. Another effective way to look for apartments is to use rental brokers. Rental broker company offices can be easily found near train stations or in local shopping areas in Japan. The fee for locating an apartment or a mansion is 0.5 to 1 month of rents.

The size of the first mansion that I stayed in was about 230 sq-ft (21 m²), with a bed, a table, a bathroom, and a tiny closet. The bathroom was so small that the toilet was located underneath the water basin. I needed to rotate the water basin, which is hinged to the wall, in order to use the toilet, and returned the basin to its usual position in order to use the shower. The second mansion was relatively spacious with a size of 350 sq-ft (31.5 m²), and it was quite modern as it was built only a few years ago. The walk to the nearest train station was only 5 minutes, but it was located right next to a major local highway. For the first few nights, it was hard to fall asleep due to the traffic noise on the street. I stayed in the second apartment for about 4 months, before I moved to a university lodge for married couples, mostly foreigners. The lodge is located in a high-end neighborhood in central Tokyo but the lodge itself was about 30 years old. The lodge is partially furnished, so we had to purchase a television, microwave oven, and rice cooker. The rent was very low, at about 30,000 yen for a 400 sq-ft room, so I still came out ahead even though I had to purchase some appliances.

Transportation

In many ways, the Japanese society, especially in the big cities, is the complete opposite of what the America society is like. Transportation is the most obvious example. The great majority of people use public transit systems in Japan to go to school and work in urban areas. The subways and trains and buses in Tokyo are so convenient that it provides great incentives for people not to use personal vehicles unless it is absolutely needed. Due to the daily need to walk to the train or subway stations and the transfer in between, most Japanese people get a good dose of exercise every day. I actually appreciated the walking opportunity every day because it helped keep me in shape.

There are a variety of Japan Railway (JR) train lines, private railways, and metro (subway) lines in Tokyo that one can easily find a route to most destinations easily. In most situations, the public transit is cheaper and more time efficient than taxi or personal cars. For people who use the transit everyday, there are commuter passes that offer good discounts. For tourists, there are also some daily passes available.

One particular interesting phenomenon in Japan is the last-train ritual. Most subways and train lines are run from early morning (5 AM or so) to past mid-night. It is common for friends to gather together or to hold parties quite late at night. If the party ends late, many people will try to catch the last train home to avoid paying for taxi. As a result, when I rode the last train on a Friday night I was rather surprised to find that the trains were so packed that I could barely get in. When the train reached a major transfer station, many people rushed out of the train and ran quickly for connection to the next last train that they needed to catch. It was quite a sight.

Riding trains and subways in Tokyo are relatively inexpensive. For example, the price of a short ride is about 120-150 yen, and 250-400 yen for longer rides or rides that require transfers to multiple train lines that are run by different companies. On the other hand, bus tickets are relatively expensive, especiallyin the rural areas. For example, in the suburbs or country sides, one-hour bus ride will cost more than 1000 yen. Several train systems already adopt the smart IC cards so one can stores money in a card and scan it through gate machines on entrance or exit. In March 2007, a new card system, PASMO, will be adopted in in the metropolitan Tokyo area, and the same IC card can be used across many train lines.

Food

You will feel that you are in paradise in Tokyo if you like sushi or sashimi (raw fish). The seafood is so fresh and so good that I already miss it even though I just came back to US for a few days. There are many different levels and varieties of sushi restaurants that the quality is not necessarily consistent. However, if you can ask for local people’s recommendations for good sushi places, you are guaranteed to be greatly satisfied.

Because of the high cost of living (hotel rates for tourists especially), most people has the impression that everything is expensive in Tokyo. On the contrary, my own travel and living experience are quite the opposite. If one doesn’t mind dining in local shops or diner-style restaurants, it is actually very enjoyable and inexpensive when compared to the costs in America or in Europe. For example, when I don’t have much time and need to grab a bite quickly, I often look for a Matsuya (松屋)or Yoshinoya (吉野屋)near train stations and have a bowl of rice covered with stewed meat and a cup of soup to fill my stomach for only 300-500 yen.

For tourists who are Japanese challenged, one good option is to dine out at a restaurant row, which is often located on the top floor of a department store. One can find these types of places near all major train stations in Tokyo easily. These restaurants have sample dishes in the front window and pictures and prices are often shown in the menu. In these places, the spending range for lunch is about 1000-1500 yen, and 1000-5000 yen for dinner per person.

There are of course high-end restaurants that will cost much more than what is stated above, but many high-end restaurants serve business people or provide social functions that are not usually frequented by regular folks. Regardless of the type of dining choices one choose, I think in general people will find the dining experience quite satisfying because there are very diverse choices. For example, young people in Japan also love pizza and pasta just like Americans and western restaurants with international flavors can be easily found. One most appealing aspect of dining out in Japan is no gratitude needs to be paid. The price you have to pay is what you see on the menu, with indications of whether the consumption tax (currently at 5%) is included or not.

One of the fun things that we love to do in Japan is to go to supermarkets where the local people shop for groceries. I have found the quality of seafood, meat, and vegetables to be quite high. There are certain types of food that are priced much higher in Japan than in US, but there are many seasonal products and frequent sale events that one can easily find items to fit the budget and the taste of personal likings. In supermarkets, there are also offerings of cooked or readily made food that one can take home for a meal without the hassle of cooking after a long day.

Social and Cultural Differences

Japan is a very dynamic country, culturally and technologically, which is one of the reasons the nation has become very competitive in many industries globally. However, there are certain elements of people’s daily lives that demonstrate relatively rigid social structures. These cultural phenomena may come across a bit strange or confusing, especially for those who are exposed to the Japanese society for the first time.

One perfect example that reveals such cultural differences is the Japanese language. The most challenging aspect of learning and using Japanese for foreigners as well as for some Japanese is that the same actions or expressions can be stated in many forms with different choice of words. It is very important that appropriate expressions are used according to the relationship between the conversing parties and the subjects of discussions. While the casual usage of words is understood between friends, the improper use of expressions or words is considered impolite or socially unacceptable.

The rigidly structured culture fabrics are also evident in people’s relationship. For example, on the UT campus I could observe that the students or staff members showed tremendous respect to the professors when they meet and greet each other. The more casual interaction between professors and students on US campuses will be considered totally inappropriate in Japan. In a company or as a matter of fact in many other types of situations, one can tell the seniority of different people by ranks or by age simply by observing how they greet or bow to each other.

There are numerous interesting things in Japanese lives and people that I can talk about. Until next time, I wish everyone a pleasant experience if you have plans to travel or to work overseas.

Ching-Yao Chan

http://path.berkeley.edu/~cychan

February 12, 2006