Last Japan Entry

Well, I'm sitting in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency hotel, waiting for the airport shuttle. It's been an awesome trip - the last couple of days have been full of sightseeing, and I feel like I've seen a good chunk of Japan - at least enough for how long we've been here. Tons, considering how much time we had.

Sunday was the finals day: I was watching many of the games, and quite enjoying it. I was even assistant ref for a few more games. I have this feeling that I'm slowly progressing to a team leader and full ref. :) One of the games - the 2 on 2 final (between Team Osaka and Nimbro), I volunteered as an assistant ref simply to get a good view of the game! It worked very well. :D It was a great game - a little slow compared to real soccer, but the robots were playing detectable soccer, and play was all over the field. It was great to see how far the robots have come just since I started going to competitions. Of course, the robots weren't too stable. There were a few "domino-effect" pile ups, and a few times when robots would walk into another and fall over. Very entertaining for the spectators, but I'm glad I'm not the one who had to worry about retuning the robot after. :) Had enough of that to do on my own robots.

I also watched the AIBO finals. That was an incredible game! The AIBOs are speedy and smart - they need to work on their passing, but they are pretty good team players! The game tied, so it was decided by a penalty shoot out, which was very interesting. The winning team had a very good striker who kept trying to fake out the goalie - it was really entertaining. :)

Monday we went to Kyoto on a guided tour. Incredibly enough, we (Terry, Paul and I) were the only people from all of RoboCup to show. Amazing. It was great tho - we ended up getting two tour guides to ourselves the *whole* day - and as they were volunteers, they only wanted about $40 for their fees and transport for the whole day! It felt like we saw the *entire* city of Kyoto - tho I'm sure there's plenty we missed. I know we saw the Golden Temple and the Silver Temple (tho it wasn't really silver at all: they ran out of money :) ), and a couple more that I can't remember the names of. I've got brochures, tho, so I can check them out later. :) It was beautiful all over tho - and I *love* the gardens. They're just gorgeous everywhere - no wonder the gardens take so long to plan, and so much care is taken by the gardeners. Most gardens I've seen have a few really good views, and they're rather obviously planned. In these gardens, there were gorgeous views all over, carefully planned I'm sure, but made to look very natural. The time spent designing and planning the gardens must have been immense. It was soooo nice to poke all over and see them. Mmmm. Lots of pictures. I forgot to empty my memory card from the finals, so I kept having to weed through my pictures throughout the day. But I managed!

Tuesday we went to Den Den town first thing in the morning, and poked thru the stores for a bit. Mostly, Brian and I found character figures to take home. Actually, Brian found more figures - I found some tiny little hand made flowers! They were so pretty! :) But I got one really samurai style figurine for a Japanese souvenir for my computer area. :) Then we went to the Osaka Aquarium. It's awesome!!! They have a lot of deep tanks, with one huge one in the center, and you just keep circling it, going lower and lower and lower, getting to see the fish through the huge windows. They also had a bunch of penguins that where a blast to watch. Once you were done looking at all the tanks, and thought it was over, turns out it wasn't ... they had a nice display of all types of jellyfish, and then you entered the kid's section. They had some sharks you could pet there - very rough skin, so I think I'll keep my distance from them in the water (not that I wouldn't anyways, actually). We then went looking around a nearby mall, and ended up in the arcade. Brian and Paul played this wierd game where you were pumping along a railway in the little cart thing - so you actually pushed the lever up and down to propell the cart in the game. Then I found some tokens in the waterfall slot machine and started playing away. (I'm sure Mike will be very proud of me for that!) It was amazing ... I must have played for an hour or so on that ... every time I thought I was getting low on coins, I'd win a bunch more from the machine. Any time one of the guys said anything, I'd give them a handful of coins and keep playing. Couldn't believe it - it was awesome! Finally they were getting bored (even with all my free handouts), so Brian started helping me just chuck in as much money as possible. I still won two more small jackpots while we were doing that ... but I think it only took 10 or 15 minutes to lose all my money. We went back to Den Den town after that, and walked around for a couple more hours before finally heading back to the hotel. It was a very long day! I did stay up after I finished my packing to finish the new Harry Potter book ... such a *good* book. Can't wait for the next one!

Today's been pretty quiet - got up and headed to Jacky's hotel to pick up the robotics stuff we stashed there, and packed it up. Then over to John's hotel where the airport shuttle is. We dropped all our bags with them, and went for lunch, but now we're back and enjoying the free wireless access, power plugins, and comfy chairs and tables. I should be in Vancouver soon ... that's going to be fun. I can't wait to get a real pillow again - Japanese pillows are closely related to rocks, so I haven't used a pillow since we got here. Mmm ... soft squashy pillow - oh yeah!

Just two more hours till the airport bus comes ... then time for our nice *long* plane ride. It's going to be nice to be back in Canada. :)