Today, it was raining, and according to the internet, it was supposed to rain all day, so I sucked up my frugality and spent a crapload of money on public transportation. To be honest, it was nice having time to read while traveling, instead of coming into lab hot and exhausted from biking. On the other hand, I was pretty miserably cold walking from the bus stop to the dojang at night.
Since I slept late (because of a fire alarm at 7 am), it was raining (lack of motivation to go outside) and I took the horribly inefficient bus (takes about an hour for distance I can cover in 30 min by biking/walking), I didn’t get to lab until around 2 pm, then went for a late lunch with the Iranian chick in my lab.
In lab, I learned how to visualize my data. First, let’s backtrack to what I’m actually researching. Background: the lab is researching the mechanical properties of malaria-infected red blood cells via simulation. I’ve been assigned the task of breaking the iRBCs and seeing what happens. It’s taken me until now to figure out the code, program something that is probably about right, and run the code to get some potentially interesting data. Since the code takes a long time to run, I cut down the number of iterations, but cut it down too much, so the data wasn’t actually that interesting. Tomorrow I’ll increase the interval time and rerun the code and maybe I’ll know something interesting by next week.
After I skipped out of lab early, I took a bus that conveniently went from campus to the part of Sendai where the dojang is located. Actually, I was surprised because, in general, Sendai buses are not actually that convenient; usually, they all travel to Sendai station. Plus, campus is on a mountain, in the middle of nowhere (comparatively speaking).
At workout, there was a new guy who’d studied tkd in Korea for a little while (I think). His kicks were pretty strong, and he picked up new kicks pretty quickly. (Seriously. He threw a couple of decent doubles. I wish I could’ve thrown doubles like that as a blue belt, even.) There was “sibling” bonding time between Ou-chan and Gentarou, the oldest boy of the group of awesome kids. They even look like brothers because they have similar hairstyles. めっちゃかわいい。
Near the end of practice, Yuka and I worked on clinch/back kick drills, which was pretty interesting because, well, who thinks of throwing back kick coming out of the clinch? My back kick has been dandan improving since I got here, so I was actually landing a lot of the back kicks, though they still don’t have a lot of power yet.
On the way home, there was bonding with Ou-chan about sparring pains (look at the bruises on my legs! ow, my hip hurts.) and stereotypes about America. (no, it’s not true that everyone has guns. if you try to hold up a store with a gun, the store owner will not pull out a bigger gun and run you away. well, it’s possible. it depends, i suppose.)
