Niigata Science Museum

We had another trip.

Every single year around this time of the year, there will be a trip organised by the school for the international students to get closer and experience the culture of Japan. This time around, we went to Niigata, the capital city of Niigata prefecture, located about one-hour drive from the place I am studying at the moment, Nagaoka.

Among the group of us who joined the trip.

The Monument of Science at the entrance hall.

This museum consists of four main exhibition halls, namely Science in Nature, Science in Our Daily Lives, The Exploring Room and The History of Technology in Niigata. In addition, there is a planetarium dome, an astronomical telescope and outdoor exhibition areas. Too bad that we couldn't enter the planetarium which was closed on that day we were there.

The first exhibition hall we went to was the hall themed Science of Nature. I was actually quite excited when someone told me that there would be the complete dinosaur bones on display. In fact, I tried to get myself to the exhibition hall as soon as I heard of that. To my disappointment however, I got to see some worms.

This is actually the fossil of one type of I-dunno-what-is-its-name sea plant.

Plants were not what I was looking for; dinosaur was. But this one caught my attention when I read the descriptions. Silicified wood (petrified wood) is wood that was buried in the earth. Underground water containing minerals such as silica soaked into the wood, changing its organic make-up. The wood eventually transformed into minerals such as agate and opal.

Silicified wood (petrified wood).

Finally, I saw some signs of dinosaur.

The fossil of the egg of Saltasaurs. Even if they put a sphere rock there, nobody would doubt it I guess.

Despite the early hype about the dinosaur exhibits, this is the most I got to see.

What to do, no choice already, but still have to camwhore with it.

I didn't dare to touch on the Mammoth's bone. Who knows, just in case it's my unlucky day and the bones might just fell apart the moment I put my hands on the bones.

Actually, I saw three dinosaurs there, but they were rubber-made dinosaurs that are controlled by computers.

There are drawings that shows the human evolution which was first introduced by Darwin. Of course there are also people who question the reliability of Darwin's idea, but for now, we shall put that aside. The drawings started with crawling monkey and ended with walking human today.

My senior insisted to be part of the evolution, but too bad he ended up in the wrong stage.

From his pose, he looked as if he really came from that stage.

I once saw real toki during my visit to Sado Island last year.

From animals kingdom, we entered another section which was mainly about astronomy. Here, exhibits such as meteorite that hit one spot in Niigata many many years ago was displayed, besides the timeline that shows the birth of the universe until where we are today.

Imagine our Earth is as huge as the gigantic Jupiter.

My two Vietnamese friends, Chuen and Dat showing their country on the globe.

The next exhibition hall was quite interesting, which was called The Exploring Room.

Most of the exhibits here are made in a way that the visitor can try for themselves the stuff on displayed, and relate them to scientific concepts. Take this two exhibits as example. The first one shows a drawing on a wall, but with the correct angle of lighting, the drawing would look like a three-dimensional drawing. As for the second one, I will leave it for you to figure it out yourself.

Cool eh?

Roby, from Indonesia and me were wondering if we had overdose of Weight Gain.

Most of the exhibits in this museum are designed to help people understand the wonderful results which have been established in the many fields of natural science and technology. Personally, I prefer this kind of museum because the theme is not that heavy, and we could experience ourselves by observing, touching and handling the displays in the museum. There are also science shows at exhibition halls, scientific experiments and handicraft workings in science laboratories held hourly, which mainly attract young visitors.

I would say this museum is more suitable for younger kids, because most of the exhibits explains simple scientific principle and from the visitors on that day, most of them were parents who brought their children there to spend some time over the weekend while exploring the world of science.

The third exhibition hall was themed, Science in Our Daily Lives.

Among the exhibits in this hall.

Japan being a country prone to earthquake, almost all buildings here are equipped with mechanism during the construction process to prevent the buildings from collapsing.

A real-sized car, cut into half to show how the engines work.

I have seen this white seal called Paro before during my visit to Tsukuba Science Square, but it got a new friend this time. They are robots designed to look like soft toys, but the interesting part is that they are able to react to the way we touch and cuddle them.

We got to set ourselves the movement of Aibo here, in fact my junior made it waving at us.

At one section, we tried on the flight simulator. It looked cool from the outside, and we thought we would get to navigate our flight like a pilot. However, that wasn't the case, as I later found out that the seat is as small as a stool. My long legs just barely fitted the limited space inside the simulator. However, I volunteered to take the first seat, and that person is in-charged of the taking off.

Although it was just a simulator and the seat doesn't move, there were doubts in myself if I will be able to make a smooth take off, or I might overturn it even before it takes off. Each of us got to control the plane for one minute and it was still quite fun.

How it look from outside doesn't represent the interior.

This is how the interior of the screen of the simulator looks like.

While waiting for the rest to gather before we head to the next location, we had our light brunch outside the museum, many thanks to my junior who made fried popia that day. I don't think I will be going to any place for autumn leaves sight-seeing this year, due to the tight schedule and the unpredictable weather. Nevertheless, the trees outside the museum looked as good as the ones in the maple leaves garden.

Yet, the Momijien I went last year still remain the best.

Look at the beautiful tone.

It is always nice to lay yourself on the fallen dried leaves on the ground.

It is time like this I long for a DSLR.

Although it's just another excuse to camwhore.

Warung Malaysia

For two days over the weekend a couple of weeks ago, the annual College Festival was held in my college.

Next year, I predict it will be "Moth".

The theme of the festival this year was "Butterfly", although I couldn't figure out the rational for picking that word as the theme of the festival. Sometimes, Japanese try to use English words in their masterpiece, but they couldn't get the right word that could get the message across. In the end, they just pick some random word and use it.

The events during the college festival were basically similar to last year; free market, exhibitions, mini games where they offer soft toys like those in fun fair, plays by the students from each course, classrooms which were turned coffee house and mini restaurants, band performances and a few others. I am not going to touch on that again this time. However, if you are interested to see them, you can refer to the last year's entry.

The HQ for all the events during the festival.

They were in-charged to keep the crowd entertained.

For a change this time, the Malaysian international students decided to open a stall during the college festival. We used to do it every single year. However, the representative for the international student failed to attend the initial meeting last year, and we didn't get the permission to open a stall. Yes, the Japanese are very strict on this matter and you cannot just simple open a stall on that day itself, without getting the permission to do so. In fact, it was not only about getting the permission, because there were numerous procedures and checks before we open the stall on that day. This year, we didn't want the same thing to happen again and I volunteered to take charge of the stall this time.

It was however, not that simple as I first thought.

The stalls set up during the college festival.

There were several times when the wind was too strong, that the blue plastic roof was blown away but they continued their business as usual.

The stall that sells takoyaki.

There were no less then five meetings, the first being held months before the real thing. Not only meetings, we were also made to undergo a stool test to make sure that our shit is clean enough so that there won't be any cases of food poisoning. Finally, after everything was put on place, came the day we all had been waiting for. Each of us fork out 1,000 yen (RM33) each as the starting capital to buy the stuff, in which we managed to make a healthy profit of almost five times that amount for each person. A day before that, we went out to get all the ingredients needed and on that night itself, we started working at the kitchen.

Just in case you are wondering what we sold this time, we sold not one, not two, but four different kinds of food. Satay, samosa, jelly and rose-flavoured selasih syrup. We were able to do it in such a big scale, because we had the numbers. Seventeen of us, to be exact.

Satay was selling like hot cakes, even without the kuah kacang.

Samosa was a hit among the Japanese as well.

However, one important thing when you do a business is how you promote your product.

Putting that into consideration, I used my limited Photoshop skills to come out with a poster for our stall with the help of a few others one night earlier. We went around the school and pasted the posters in strategic locations, but one of the best must be this one. I thought of the idea of pasting it inside the lift, and my senior made the idea better by suggesting that we paste it next to the buttons inside the lift. That would make sure that people will notice our poster when they enter the lift.

I'm not saying this just because I designed the poster but I think it looks not bad. What say you?

On the first day, it was drizzling early that morning and there were concerns that the crowd coming to the festival would be affected by that. Fortunately, it stopped soon afterward and a few of us went early to set up our stalls.

We were the last stall to get there and set up our stall, which is in the middle.

Not wanting to be left behind by the next stall, we began our work immediately.

But in between that, I didn't miss the opportunity to wash my eyes.

After everything were in place, we started our business and it slowly got better as the people began to increase when it approached noon.

Finally, our stall was up and running.

We even had the principal of our college to stop by our stall and he bought two sticks of satay from us. I think he went to every stall and bought something from each stall, so that he won't look like he is supporting just one particular stall. But I wonder if he managed to finished all the food that he bought.

If he did, he must have put up a couple of inches to his waistline.

Mr Principal wanted to pay with one of his many credit cards.

Our stall this year was a great success; in fact our stall was the second one to finish selling off our stuff out of almost ten stalls there. There was an early fear that the weather could play a big role and our food won't finish. Despite so, the business was way better than our earlier expectations because by one to two in the evening, our food almost sold out already. In fact, some of our seniors from Nagaoka University of Technology nearby came only to find out that we have closed our stall. Nevertheless, we offered them free syrup to our poor seniors who came all the way for our already-sold-out satay.

Satay and samosa were the fastest to be sold out, followed closely by the colourful jelly. Although the selasih syrup looked like it was not getting much sale, one of my junior did a great job in attracting customers who walked pass our stall and in the end, it finished as well.

My junior in a two-in-one mission - promoting our food while flirting around.

If kids come to our stall, we would hand them with satay and their parents indirectly will feel obliged to pay for the satay. Smart marketing strategies lol.

For the two days, we sold almost 500 sticks of satay, 650 pieces of samosa, six trays of jelly and two huge container of syrup water. Our gross income for the two days was more than 80,000 yen (RM2,666) and with that amount, I can actually get a return ticket back to Malaysia already. Well, our return was that much because our satay was RM3 per stick, RM2 for one samosa, 4 piece of jelly for RM3 and one cup of syrup was sold at RM3.

If we were to do a similar business in Malaysia, I know we can close shop straight away.

I wanted to name our stall as "Warung Pak Cik Ali" initially, but I find it difficult for the Japanese to pronunce it.

It was also through coordinating this thing, that made me realised of one very important thing - teamwork.

It so happened that I started to watch this drama 医龍 (Iryuu) - Team Medical Dragon recently that I have got addicted to it so much. It is not just another hospital drama. The storyline is really good that centers around a medical team that is considered the best team around to perform the Batista surgery, considered one of the toughest cardiac surgery which is very risky. When a person like me who hardly watches any anime or drama to find himself glued to the set every time, it must be something special, ain't it? Make sure you watch it if you have the chance.

One main thing that I am impressed with this drama is the teamwork among the members of the team every time they perform a surgery. And from there, I somehow find myself relate it to the teamwork we had when we were working on our stall. Everyone was ready to cooperate from the start until the end, that it made everything went smoothly.

Aki promoting our stall; his smile is already enough to attract customers.

Notice that deer soft toy hanging from atop; it's our lucky charm, according to my junior. Take it down and our business would not go smoothly.

Standing cutting eight packets of chicken into small pieces, staying up until almost one in the morning to stick the satay while crapping together, waking up as early as five in the morning to cook the fillings for the samosa; those were just part of the hard works they made to make sure that all go as planned.

On the day itself, each of us seemed like each person has known their job although we didn't really determined who will be frying the samosa, who will be burning the satay, who will take charge of the cashier, and who will be promoting our stall. Whenever someone needs another person to give a helping hand, the person who is free will help out without any second thoughts.

Ming Jing frying the samosa while Wei Shen and Aki burning the satay behind.

We had no choice but to use those paper fan, which people usually use during fireworks festival in the summer.

Quoting from one of the episodes in that drama, a team is like a maths formula. No matter how huge the number is, but if you add a zero to it, it will still end up being zero. Same thing applies here. If there happen to be one team member who are unwilling to help out, but only interested in giving instructions to the annoyance of other team members, the job will never get done and there will not be any end result.

Eventually, the team will be a failure.

Whenever there were no customers, we will use the time to camwhore.

Sometimes, it turned out to be some funny pose.

Nevertheless, being the coordinator doesn't mean I just sat there doing nothing and instructing the others. I tried my best to help out at every department and whenever there is a decision to be made, I made sure I asked the opinion from everybody first. I am not trying to boast here that I was the one who head this thing though. I am grateful to have a wonderful and helpful team members around, that it made it a smooth sailing for the job to be done.

I have to admit that after the two days, I was as dead like a sardine fish inside the can and couldn't even do my work properly because I was too exhausted. Fortunately, it was a public holiday the next day that I could get my well-deserved rest before class resumed the next morning. In a whole, it was a truly an enjoyable experience for getting the chance to organise something like that, and I am already looking forward to the same thing next year.

A few Malaysian seniors from NUT who came to our stall as well.

Both of them have the same name - Sato, and the one on the left owns a ski resort in Myoko.

Minasan, otsukaresamadeshita :)