Because this day was so crazy I put it into two parts.
Yokohama- After staying up late last night to finish some experiments I took off in the morning to go to Yokohama to the BMB 2007- the 30th annual meeting of the molecular biology society of Japan and the 80th annual meeting of the Japanese biochemistry society. It’s easier to say that it was a big nerd conference. It was held at Pacifico Yokohama, a huge conference hall. It was a really pleasant walk from the Sakuragichou station. You walk through a beautiful shopping mall and see a large Ferris wheel. Inside the conference hall were literally hundreds of posters lined up. Our lab put up about 10 for the week. Also there were chemical companies promoting their products. The best part was getting all the free stuff.
At the BMB conference I saw an Agilent Technologies booth. I used to work for them during the summer so it was cool to talk to the guys there. The conference was packed with companies and literally you couldn’t read all the posters that were up in one day.After I went around with Yamamoto-san collecting things like coffee cups, shirts, calendars, USB drives, tons of pens, and paperweights I made my way up to Sendai to see my friends Maya and Kristin from high school. The train ride was quite comfortable on the bullet train, but I could feel it getting colder as I traveled up north.
Sendai- I always wanted to go to Sendai because my mother served her mission there over 30 years ago. I heard so much about it and now that my friends from high school were there it was the perfect time to finally go. However, it was only for one night.
I got to Sendai in the evening and it was dark and rainy. I met up with Maya at sendai station and we ate a “zunda” green soy bean shake and gyuutan- cow tongue. They both sound gross, but they’re both well known in Japan. After getting lost while meeting up with Maya at the station we finally met up with Kristin at an ALT party where we ate Indian food. Yeah, Indian food in Japan. Maya was so nice to treat me. After dinner us three Iolani kids just saw Sendai. We saw some of the Christmas lights that were still up. The most interesting thing of the night was meeting a young college kid who was drawing people’s faces on the street. We each paid him 5 dollars to draw our faces. It was really cool, but I left the picture in Sendai. Anyway, he wrote our faces with our Japanese characters. We all thought it was pretty amazing. After that it got cold and late. We planned to sing karaoke, but instead we just went home.
The store that sells green soy bean shakes. It was pleasantly good. Maya also treated me to the other famous product of Sendai gyuutan. It was also good. 
Me and Maya in the streets in Sendai. We came back here to get our faces drawn by a young college student.
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