Saltire blog part 1

As part of my contract with the SaltireFoundation, I have to keep a weekly blog for them - it differs from this one as it focuses more on the work aspect of my internship. You can read my first weekly round-up here.

Milk of human kindness

Japan has to be the kindest and friendliest nation on the planet. Honestly. I have never been made to feel as welcome as I have here; not just by my colleagues but also by complete strangers.

If you ask someone for help, advice or directions (even in my garbled version of Japanese) they go completely out of their way to help you. When I was in Ginza the other night, I asked a guy who was walking home at work where a restaurant was. He wasn't entirely sure but wanted to make sure that I got there, so walked around for 20 minutes with me, trying to find the place! When I eventually did find somewhere to eat, the guy sitting next to me at the bar thought I was such a novelty that he bough me pudding and another iced tea. Turns out he was a big fan of golf and was so excited when I told him that I went to university in St Andrews!

And again today, I sit down at the bar and order some food and instantly attract attention from randoms. Alone, female, short, with very pale skin and freckles, taking photographs of the food - I kind of stand out like a sore thumb. The elderly couple next to me insisted that I tried some of their food and, when I told them that it tasted great, proceeded to order more specifically for me!! The more I protested it seemed the more they ordered! And they bought me more iced tea too. The old lady kept smiling at me and calling me kawaii (cute) and congratulating me on getting into university and getting a job in Tokyo.

This is one of the reasons why Tokyo is easily the safest city I've ever been to. I feel as though everybody is looking out for me and wants to make sure that I'm okay.

Can you imagine anyone back home being anywhere near as nice?

Further delays expected

Okay, I'm too tired to blog properly today and have to go to sleep asap so I can wake up at 4am to see Tsukiji fish market in all it's early morning glory. I plan on exploring as much of Tokyo as is humanly possible this weekend :D

Work today was good, chatted with the Americans who deal with European government bonds and spent the afternoon teaching myself some more stuff. Went out for lunch with my boss again to chat about how I was finding things so far - got some really nice feedback from the people I've been working with. We went to one of the neighbouring buildings and had the best tonkatsu for lunch. I forgot to take my camera (oh dear, I'll just have to eat it again so I can take a photo...) but if you google it, you can see what I'm talking about. It's pork fillet that's fried in panko breadcrumbs, which is drizzled with this awesome sauce and served with shredded cabbage.

I went to Akihabara (locally known as 'electric town') after work and bough myself a nice Canon SLR digital camera. It's the Kiss X3 Canon and I don't think you can even get it in the UK yet! I've managed to get about £1000 worth of kit for just over £500, so it's all good! Now I just need to work out how to use it in time for tomorrow. Hmmmm.

EDIT I can't believe I forgot to say that I had my first boba tea today! Iced lychee tea with chewy tapioca balls (not frogspawn, which is kind of what it looks like).

I'm such a gaijin...

So I actually did get pushed onto the train this morning. Or rather, pushed by the person who was being pushed onto the train. I promised pictures of the 'pushers' so I took some! I got some really strange looks from the other commuters when I whapped out my camera...

I spent most of today beginning to learn the stuff I'll need to know for my 'Sales Rep 2' exam, namely: accountancy (balance sheets etc), GDP and P&L. There's a considerable amount more to it but these are the subjects that I can teach myself from Wikipedia. I got to sit down and have a chat with the two guys who trade securitised mortgage and assest bonds today and learnt a lot from them. I found this branch of the market particularly interesting as when assessing risk, there's a massive human element to it - people who take out mortages could win the lottery, get divorced or get hit by a bus, and all these factors affect the probability that the mortgage provider will lose out on cash in one way or another. Mortgages are simultaneously a very secure and a very risky loan for a bank to make, and this is kind of how the mortgage bond market has evolved. At least, that's what I got from today...

After work, I headed south past Tokyo station and headed towards Ginza. I had no idea what to expect from this area of Tokyo apart from knowing that there would be some designer shops and that I wanted to find the statue of Godzilla. I did:



Ginza was incredible! It is like Times Square on steroids and spread over a much larger area. Every building lights up and flashes and there are billboards with massive speakers blaring the adverts as well, just incase you missed the gigantic screen. As a result of everyone (including me!!) in Tokyo working ridiculously long hours (and not stopping for lunch, I'd like to add - more on work ethics another time, I'm too tired) all the shops stay open until 8/9pm. Shopping in the dark in this area has to be better anyway because then you can properly experience the full lightshow!

The designer stores are everywhere and every label you could think of occupies all the floors of its own twenty-storey, ultra-modern building. There are also massive department stores on every block, sometimes two right next door to each other. I've heard from my colleagues that the Japanese are very fond of department store shopping, and that each depato is favoured by a different demographic. I was just happy to find the biggest Muji I had ever seen in the basement of one of them! Who knew that Muji sold food as well as everything else?! It was a department store within a department store!

Some of the shops I particularly liked the look of were, Uniqlo:



This department store filled with designer concessions that was rainbow-themed:



And the Hermes shop, which was completely clad in polished glass bricks:

It's peanut butter jelly time!

It actually was for me this morning! Last time I went to the 7/11 to get some food, I bought bread and peanut butter to spread on it. Except that it wasn't peanut butter as I know it, it was the Japanese version.



Their take on the tasty peanut spread is actually a peanut flavoured jelly in a tub, which, once spread, has the consistency of lemon curd.



I was a bit disappointed at first but after the first few bites, I grew to enjoy it. And now I get to enjoy peanut butter jelly time every morning! Just incase you have no idea what I'm talking about, here's the original peanut butter jelly time:



I also had my first bento for lunch today! :D It consisted of pork katsu, miso salmon, various pickles and rice. Oishikatta!!



This is fast becoming a food blog!

Blooming marvellous

I decided to try taking different trains on the underground this morning to try to cut down my journey time a bit, which worked, but it seems that absolutely EVERYONE who lives in my area goes this way too - the stations were absolutely heaving with commuters and I narrowly avoided being pushed onto a train by a wee woman wearing white gloves who shouted. A lot. I'll try to get a photo of the 'pushers' tomorrow morning as it's actually a really good system - they keep people away from the edge of the platform until the train has arrived and then shove as many people as possible into each carriage.

I spent this morning at the Bloomberg office (in the Marunouchi Building, next to mine) being trained in how to use their 'Bloomberg Professional Service'. I want to leave RBS and work for them - their office is the coolest and most futuristic 4 floors of a building that I have ever been in! And, most importantly, all the food and drink in the uber-modern canteen area is free! You walk through a tunnel that's lit with eerie blue lights to get from the reception into the main concourse.



Then, running diagonally across the whole floor is a stream of stock exchange tickers and figures. Also at one end of the office is a massive aquarium - apparently one of the CEOs liked fish!



You can also see a bit of the cafeteria seating in the photo. All the food and drink (and there's plenty choice) is completely free to employees. I think it's to try to persuede you to stay in the office over lunch and carry on talking business. I was a bit jealous as I accidentally ordered tofu instead of chicken for my lunch (they looked really similar) and at that point in time, I wanted something that didn't have a slimey texture. A lot of Japanese food seems to be slimey or chewy or an odd combination of the two, which is great if you're expecting it, but not if you think you are biting into chicken...

The weather was so stunning today that I decided to take some photos of the views from my building:

The first one shows Tokyo Station and the other two show the Imperial Palace and Gardens (the last photo is actually the view from Bloomberg's building, but their view was better!).

I spent the afternoon learning about options and swaps with the office's dollar options trader. Also, I've started researching the kind of stuff I'll need to know for my 'JSDA Securities Sale Representative Class-2' exam. I'm hoping to sit this (the Japanese equivalent of the FSA's exams) whilst I'm here with RBS as it would be more than fantastic for my CV - most people don't get to sit it until their first year in a graduate position. If I pass, it also means I might be able to study for the 'Sales Rep Class-1' exam and sit that too, and that one includes a lot of the options stuff that I started learning about today. If (and that's a really big IF) I pass that one, then I would actually be a fully qualified trader and could pretty much walk into a position at any financial instituion in Japan. All together now: "Oooooooo."

I had a bit of a wander around the other buildings in the financial district after work this evening, mainly to try and suss out where the good places to get lunch are! The Marunouchi area is very similar to Manhattan - all the buildings are new skyscrapers with fancy interiors and even fancier shops, sitting next to a large park that acts a bit like a small version of central park. It looks even more like New York once it's dark.

Oh, and I still haven't unpacked yet. Oops.

It's off to work I go

My first day at work was pretty exciting. When I left to take the subway in the morning, I was so surprised by the number of people walking in my nieghbourhood - when I arrived on Sunday there was hardly anyone to be seen. Then, there were even more people crowded underground, getting the trains to work. Where had they all been at the weekend?! Thankfully, it wasn't as hectic as I had imagined - I didn't have to be pushed onto the train and I made it to work in one piece after dodging past all the fast-walking fast-talking salarymen.

The building I'm in (the Shin-Marunouchi Centre Building) is fantastic - I'm working on the 20th floor (RBS has the 9th, 19th, 20th and 21st floors) and on one side of the front office there is a fantastic view across the Imperial Palace gardens towards Shinjuku. I spent most of the morning being shown around the offices and introduced to everyone. I then got taken out for lunch and ate my first authentic sushi :)

Sushi in the UK doesn't even come close to the real deal - this was absolutely oishi (delicious). My boss ordered us a platter each that had tuna, some sort of white fish, squid, crab, eel, mackerel, see urchin and fish roe sushi. The crab was definitely the best one (the tuna came a very close second), the squid was an odd mix of crunchy and chewy, and the sea urchin was definitely an aquired taste... It also came with green tea and miso soup, with a wee square of black sesame pudding to finish. It was at this point that it really dawned on me that I was living in Japan and I couldn't stop grinning like an idiot for a good half hour.

I spent yesterday afternoon and most of today trying to learn as much as possible from the sales guys and the traders about bonds, swaps, derivatives and futures (I still have a lot to learn...) and generally getting some fantastic advice about the industry. I'm finding learning the intricacies of the markets really interesting and often very surprising. I've only been with RBS for two days, but already I've had a great insight to a completely new, and very exciting, world.

This morning I got to go to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. I was completely underwhelmed. The whole trading floor with men in suits shouting and gesticulating wildly at screens and each other has been replaced with a bank of twenty or so computers occupied by a handfull of people sitting calmly and quitely infront of the screens. The 'tour' was really just a bird's eye view of a glorified office.



It just made me wonder what happened to all the shouting men. Where have they gone? What do they shout at now? Hopefully I should fare better with tomorrow's tour of the Bloomberg building and my subsequent Bloomberg training.

Went out with a colleague after work and had yakitori for tea tonight. Apparently the Japanese aren't a fan of cooking anything; it's not just fish they eat raw. I had wasabi chicken breast that had only just been seared (hello salmonella), chicken neck, chicken shoulder, barely-seared chicken liver (which has a consistency not dissimilar to butter), chicken wing, chicken thigh (I think...), meatballs made from chicken meat and cartillage (that's what the crunchy bits were anyway) and courgette. All on sticks and prepared infront of you by a chef in traditional Japanese garb. It all came with a bowl of grated daikon that was topped with a raw egg - the aim is to mix the two together and use as a pallet cleanser between the different 'sticks'. Again, all of it was absolutely delicious, if a little different from the food I'm used to at home!

The Eagle has landed

KONNICHIWA TOKYO! I actually arrived yesterday, but was so knackered that I fell asleep really early and didn't have time to post on here. So much has happened already and I've only been in the country for 40 hours! Where to start...

The flight was great and the food was the best I've had on a plane journey for a long time. I didn't manage to get much sleep though, which was a bit rubbish. When I got to the airport, I went to use the toilet and hilarity ensued... All the toilets were 'super toilets', i.e. they have hundreds of different buttons on them that are all in Japanese and utterly indecipherable. I pressed the one with a picture of a toilet on it in an attempt to flush it but it only made a flushing sound affect from a speaker - this is to disguise your 'toilet sounds' I later read. I couldn't work out how to actually flush the thing and was too scared to press any of the other buttons for fear of water squirting out in every direction (they have various 'cleaning' options, one with a picture of a bum on it). I started giggling and ended up spending an extra 5 minutes in the cubicle, laughing quite audibly, until I found the flush. Needless to say, I got a few strange looks when I walked out...

Getting from Narita to Tokyo (who builds an airport 60km from the city centre?!) turned out to be really straightforward - I just hopped on a bus to Tokyo Station and got a taxi from there to my apartment. The bus journey was interesting - every spare plot of land between the massive buildings and factories has been irrigated and turned into rice paddies, making for some pretty contrasting scenery.

After getting into my flat, I went for a bit of a wander to find myself some food for dinner and breakfast. I went to the local Family Mart and 7/11 shops and bought a load of random stuff, including an individually wrapped banana. I had the banana with an adzuki-filled pancake for breakfast this morning.



Dinner last night consisted of some of the stuff I'd bought plus a non-descript fried thing on a stick that I'd pointed at in a shop. It turned out to be a pork and leek skewer, fried in panko crumbs, and was quite delicious.



I then explored the subway a bit to work out how I could get to work. This turned out to be one of the most disorientating experiences of the day as, on the escalators that lead up and down to the underground, people stand ON THE LEFT!! Having used the London undeground quite a lot (I'm forever popping down to London for one thing or another), it seemed really odd to not stand patiently on the right. It really does show how at home I've been made to feel already if that is the most alien thing I've encountered so far.

I'm flaking again (goodness only knows what time it is in my head) so will have to write about my first day at work after my second, tomorrow evening. I have SO much to learn - financiers speak a completely different language as far as I'm concerned just now... But I'm really looking forward to heading to the Tokyo Stock Exchange tomorrow morning :)

Popped into the restaurant around the corner from my flat to get some grub this evening, ending up with me, the waiter and the chef in absolute stitches as a result of my extremely poor Japanese and their understanding of English. Somehow, I ended up with an utterly delicious meal! And they really enjoyed my attempts at conversation and the fact that I said yes to everything and then ate it. I got told I was very kawaisa for trying so hard :)

Manicured and ready to go!

I've had my nails done, printed off some meishi, packed, made it to the airport on time, got an upgrade to business class for my Heathrow flight and am currently enjoying the first class lounge (it helps having friends who work for BMI!). My adventure starts here...

I'm not as nervous as I should be - I don't think it's really sunk in yet that I'm on my way to Tokyo and will be living there for two whole months! And will be working in a field that I currently have no clue about! What on Earth am I doing?! I feel slightly more prepared after having watched Lost in Translation again recently :p

Anyway, I'll be boarding soon so I better get a move on and find my gate.

Writen at 10:00 GMT in Edinburgh airport (it wouldn't let me post it from my phone for some reason...)

Not long to go now

It's only 3 days until I fly out to Tokyo. It's kind of crept up on me actually - I seem to have gone from feeling like I had lots of time until I left to thinking, "OhmygodI'mleavingonSaturday!!!!" I am torn between being extremely excited and feeling a sort of nervous anticipation, but with an overwhelming sense that I'm not even slightly ready. To be honest though, I probably couldn't be more ready if I tried. I am as prepared as I'll ever be (and it's too late to start preparing anything else now anyway!).

I've got my visa, some yen, a semi-packed suitcase and an incredibly basic grasp of how to ask for stuff in Japanese. I don't yet have enough little gifts to take out with me, a complete set of documents that RBS still need, any idea of how to get to my apartment (or get my keys for that matter...) and any clue of the kind of work I'l be doing when I get there! I think that pretty much explains my mixed feelings.

On the other hand, I've had loads of fantastic advice from people who have visited or lived in Japan and am now thinking that 8 weeks is not nearly enough time to do/see everything that I want to. Then again, I do have to keep reminding myself that I will actually have to work when I'm out there, so will really only have the weekends free. I cannot wait!

Depending on how much running around I'm doing on Friday night, I might try to quickly post my feeling the night before I leave. Otherwise, I'll probably try to find some free wifi in Heathrow. Or just employ my usual tactic of leaving everything until the very last gasp and blog a bit on Sunday night when I'm in my place in Tokyo.

And now I'm too excited to sleep... :D

Tokyo, here I come....

Well exams are over and summer is here so I can officially let myself get massively excited about going to Japan now! I've been trying to learn some Japanese over the past few weeks (in between hoping back and forth from St Andrews to Edinburgh, clearing out my student flat) and it's really quite tricky. And that's without even trying to teach myself how to read/write it - I think I will stick to conversational Japanese just now...

I don't know a huge amount about exactly what I will be doing when I get there but I will be working within the Markets Division, hopefully with a different department each week. I recently found out where I'll be staying: I have a studio apartment (aka one room) in Nihonbashi, Chuo-ku. I've seen pictures and it looks perfect - and it's right in the centre of Tokyo! Fantastic! In fact, I think it's about two metro stops from RBS, which is in the Shin-Marunouchi Building, Chiyoda-ku. I wonder how long I'll have been there before I experience my first earthquake :S

What I'm going to try and do is keep a daily (or at least bi-daily) log of my experiences on here. Part of my contract with the Saltire Foundation is to keep a weekly blog on their website. This has to reflect mainly on the work aspect of the placement (for obvious reasons, really...) but I want to be able to let everyone at home know more about the social side of things and will also try to post photos. (I plan on buying a new camera in Akihabara!) Hopefully, by posting regularly on here, I'll be able to then use that to cobble together a more sensible post for the 'official' blog (and let my mum know I'm still alive :P). I'll put a link in the right-hand bar for my other blog when I get it started.

I leave on Saturday 11th July and cannot wait to go! All I need to learn now is how to say, "Can I get a free upgrade?" in Japanese.

YATTA!

I'm going to Tokyo this summer! I have never been so excited!

I got the eight-week internship with RBS in Japan! This means that I will get to go and live in Tokyo for two months and work in a different section of their business every week. And will also get to eat nothing but Japanese food and buy jeans that are the right length for me AND collect a ridiculous amount of Hello Kitty paraphernalia! :D I will try and write a slightly more sensible post once I have found out more and managed to calm down a bit. Oh, and once I have told Selex that I know won't be able to work there... Crap.

This is not a cat blog

But I do love cats. And Maru is one of my favourites. His affinity for cardboard boxes is unrivalled.







As a good friend once told me, "curiosity didn't kill the cat, Schrodinger did. Maybe."

I haven't met a physicist who doesn't like xkcd

One of my most recent favourites. The mouseover text reads "Sure, we could stop dictators or pandemics, but we could also make the signs on every damn diagram make sense."

From xkcd

When did I say that again?

I had been talking to a friend recently about Facebook and we were wondering whether everybody's account appeared in Google searches. So I just searched for my name + Facebook and accidentally came across an article in the Independent where I am quoted! It came out last Thursday and can be found here.

It was a bit of a surprise as I had forgotten even speaking to the reporter - I got a phone call straight after I came back from the 'Building the Britain of the Future' expo in Westminster in January. It makes for interesting reading (and I think I make a vaild point :P) and it's nice to see that the media are still picking up on points that have been made recently by the PM and Lord Drayson.