Welcome Party

Waki lab members hosted a welcoming party for the 3 newcomers. I was told that this is a tradition that runs in every lab, every school.

There are three newcomers this semester. There's Wu Lan-san from Mongolia. She has been in Japan for 5 years already, already very fluent in conversational Japanese and decent in English. She's doing her phD courses right now.

Then there's Tao-san from Nanjin, China. He's only a research student, hoping to enroll into the school in half a year. English and Japanese being his 2nd and 3rd language, he has an extremely difficult time expressing himself to anybody. So a lot of the time he resorted to speaking mandarin to me or Wu Lan-san and ask us to translate. In my opinion, he's not as courteous as Wu Lan-san, and can be seem very immature from time to time. Being fresh out of university that is understandable. He's not a bad person and is quite genuine, but he is totally unaware that he's annoying the hell out of everybody. A lot of the times he'll pull over a student in the lab to share about his life. Japanese students, being courteous to the extreme, would sit there and listen to him without really getting what he's trying to say for hours. That's where I get pulled over.

It must be the most irritating thing and such a contrast between Mainlander student and my neighbor labmate Ohgai-san. I had my earbuds on, listening to my Japanese conversation CDs and he would start talking to my ears, then I would turn around, paused the player on my computer, pull out the earbuds and listen to his question. He did that 6-7 times within the hour. Mari had to listen to Tao-san's chinese musical CD and hear about the Communist Chinese history.

I am actually the first person to arrive into the lab. Some of the master degree students came to welcome me at Suzukakedai station. There was Yazu-san, Ohgai-san, and Ochi-san. Everybody's really friendly and helpful to me. I guess that's because I usually don't ask for help unless I really need help and that I am from Canada.

The welcome party was pretty fun, everybody stood up and introduce themselves IN ENGLISH, which proved to be a bit of a challenge for most Japanese students. We used it as an entertainment. I feel really comfortable in Waki lab. Kim-san, a 2nd year phD student from Korea told me there's no other lab as friendly as Waki lab, and Professor Waki is so open-minded and approachable that she often comes into the lab to chat with the students or joke around with them.