Worth a thousand words...

Finally, we come to the last post that I will make regarding my trip to Japan. I know I am dragging this out rather long, but we took A LOT of pictures. It is also my hope that someone who is also going to undertake a trip to Japan will come across this blog - or at least the 3 posts that concern Japan - and find information or ask questions about it. That way my knowledge can become someone elses.

As far as things relating to the internship all is going well. I have completed paper surveys for anti-bacterial medications which have already helped me. I got about another 15 surveys over the last weekend by taking some paper surveys with me. Just yesterday I submitted the last thing I needed for IRB approval and spoke with the woman in charge of billing and she said we should be good to go. Now I just wait, but soon I should have access to the patients at 3 major hospitals in the valley. That should work out just fine...

Anyway, let's get on with the photos, I also have some video to post for which I am excited. So far I have not had an opportunity to post any videos.

So, at this point in our journey we are in northern Honshu Japan.
All over the place people had really neat and well maintained gardens.

This was taken from a cemetery cloes to where we were staying. I can't be sure, but I think that the ashes of the deceased are in the tomb. People will also bring personal belongings and favorite foods or drinks of the deceased person as offerings for their spirit. Most people are married in Shinto ceremonies, but buried in Buddhist cemetaries.

Here is a shot of me standing at the Tori gate of a Shinto shrine just down the street from the cemetery in the last photo.

This is a package of Octopus that we saw in the fish market in Hachinohe
Also from the fish market. You can't tell, but the crabs in this box are still alive and crawling around.

These are tentacles from a Giant Octopus. Even though they had been cut of from the main body of the Octopus they were fresh enough that they would dilate and react to touch. My hand is there to give an idea of the size of these things.

These are squid guts that I ate at the fish market. They were about as good as they sound, but it was rude to refuse if someone offered you something. I tried to be a good ambassador of my country by keeping it down; felt kind of ill the rest of the day though.

This was from a mall in Hachinohe. The floats that they build for festivals put any and all of our floats to shame.

While we were in Misawa - the place that we stayed for the remaining 2 weeks we were gone - we went to the Aomori Show Restaurant. It was a bit pricey, but so worth it. This is a picture of the apetizer a big plate of all kinds of sushi.
Japanese food is not for the feint of heart.
This is the rest of the meal from the Show Restaurant. Each level is a different course.

This is in a place called Oirasse Gorge. It is hard to over-state the beauty of Japanese landscapes.

Also in Oirasse Gorge. There is a legend about this spot, that a beautiful woman once lived under that rock and seduced travels so that she might murder them and steal their things.
This is me and my wife in front of a waterfall also in Oirasse Gorge.

This is a badger that we happened upon while visiting the area.

This is from 'Shipwreck Beach'. The name fits the place rather well, as you can tell.

(Unfortunately after trying for several hours I won't be able to post video after all. I am messing with file converters, but so far I have not come up with anything that works. I will have to post video later when I can get the thing working.)

This is the 100 yen sushi store. All of the dishes come across on a conveyor belt and you pull off the things that you want to eat. I am not sure of all the stuff we ate because it was all in Kanji.

This is the seagull shrine. Not sure of the real name, that is just what we called it because of all of the seagulls. I wish I could get the video to work, the noise is just deafening. If you have ever seen Alfred Hitchcock's movie, 'The Birds' it was A LOT like that.

This is Tanasashi Seaside Park. It is where we ate lunch, just a pretty place to look at.

And finally, we got to see some Snow Monkeys. They are so called because they live in the northern part of Japan where there is heavy snow. These monkeys survive by hanging out around hot pools during the cold winter months. This part was pretty cool, I had never seen monkeys before!



That concludes my photo adventures through northern portion of Honshu Japan. I really enjoyed this trip. I think anyone that can should go, I am definetly going to try to get back. Thank you for looking at all of my pictures, I know there have been a ton. Starting next week the features will be back and life will continue as normal, at least for this blog and for my internship.

Summer, summer time

I love summer.
This has been the first summer I have taken off since I have been in college. It has been nice.

Ok, back to business (side note: have you ever wondered why it is that the format for blogging takes the shape it does? Why does everything I write end up in this cramped column down the middle of the page? That is odd to me, there is a lot of wasted space). Yesterday I completed another paper survey, it is just awaiting approval from Sara so I can go ahead and print and administer. Also I spent some time yesterday working on getting to the right channels so that I could get IRB - institutional review board - approval so that I can start doing surveys at clinics with my hospital and other hospitals that are in the network. For obvious reasons facilities tend to be really careful about who they let gather information from human subjects. This is especially true of the pediatric and infirmed populations. For a long time I worked at a group-home for the developmentally disabled and it took a lot of time and documented work to be able to remove rights from our clients if they could not handle them. It is, however, hard to describe how difficult and complicated it is to try and get to the right people when trying to conduct any sort of research. You never get the right person and they usually have no idea what you are talking about (side note: I just found the right person to talk to and will be sending out the online application within moments. Hooray for me!).
If I can get that done fast enough I should be off and working in no time at all. For some reason I am still holding the lead in the internship, I assume that will change soon, but once I have my new surveys ok'd I can go out and bug people in the neighborhood and get some more surveys in no time at all. Entering the data later kind of sucks though.

Ok, this will be the last post detailing my adventures in Japan. Last night on the radio I heard an advert for travel in Beijing China for a really good price, for some reason though my wife seemed hesitant to pay another several thousand dollars on a vacation in the fall.
After this post I will return to my discussions of medications. Recently when making the new paper surveys I found that www.ratedrug.com has a listing of medications based upon the condition that is being treated. That opens up huge areas to talk about other medications for the neurological patient. There were a lot on there that I know about, but for some reason just forgot.

When we last left off we were traveling north to Misawa. Actually we did not stay in Misawa proper, it was more like a suburb. The name of where we stayed was Oirasse. Most of the people in Japan consider the place that we stayed to be the 'backwoods' of Japan. Kind of like how we tend to think of people who live in the Ozarks.
As you can plainly see I am working with a different format for the photo. I also think I will ditch the parenthesis. Too much punctuation just gets in the way.

This is just kind of a cool pagoda we saw when we stopped in Matsushima Bay. It is supposed to be one of the top 5 prettiest places to see in all of Japan.

Here is antoher picture of Matsushima Bay, this is looking out over the bay. That bridge can be crossed for a fee, we didn't do it because the people we were with were cheap.
This is my mother - the blonde woman on the right - with my sister's family at a shrine/ grotto around Matsushima Bay. She and her husband are the people who showed us around Japan for 3 weeks because he is in the Air Force and is stationed at Misawa Air Base. Everywhere we went it was that pretty and green.
Here is another shot of the grotto/ shrine. There were a lot of cool Buddhas and Bodisatvas too, but there will be a lot of Buddha pictures, so I won't linger too long here. I do miss how pretty it was though. I can see why they have a pseudo-nature worship culture.
I had to add this picture. This tree is over 700 years old and was just growing in some guys yard. I think it is a Juniper.

Here is an example of local cuisine. We walked past a woman who was grilling a squid and putting some sort of soy baste on it. The things that look like snails are actually scallops. The scallops were not too good, but I liked the squid pieces. She even threw in some tentacles for free.

This is another great example on Engrish. This was found at the Daiso or 100 Yen store - which kicks the crap out of our dollar store. They had all kinds of things for sale there.

Finally up north we were able to see this outside of Aomori; the biggest Buddha in all of Japan. If you look closely you can see me and my wife standing in front of it - this should give you and idea of the scale.
This is the Buddha's head sticking out over the treetops - once again, this should help you appreciate the scale of this thing.

These next several will be of the aquarium also in Aomori.




This was cool. It is a local style of dining where you have a grill set in the table and they give you raw vegetables and meat to cook and you cook it yourself on the grill. I would like to set one of these up in the states, but I bet a lawsuit would be right around the corner from some idiot who burned himself.
Here is that same table covered in plates, now that we ordered our stuff.

This was a carrot field just on the other side of the road from where we stayed. I think that picture is cool.

It is at this point I realize that I must make a third chronicle of my adventures in Japan. I have posted another 10 pictures and I still have at least that number left to go. I will try to post later this week - more like next week - but because I am going out of town on Thursday next week seems much more likely.
Thanks for your time, I hope you found my photos as fun as I did. I will hopefully finish off the last in the next post.

Land of the Rising Sun

Greetings one and all. I know that it has been almost a month since I last posted anything here. That is because I have been on a rather long vacation to Japan. It is hard to describe how cool Japan is unless you have been there. I have never felt more tall in my life and I am only 6 feet tall.
Even though I was only there for about 3 weeks I find that some part of me will miss things about Japan for some time to come; it is a place that makes a large impression.
My wife and I took about a million photos so I will subject you to at least a few of the cool ones (I will also place captions so that they make more sense as to just what you are looking at). Obviously I can not post all of my photos - it is not that they are not all good, there are just too many of them for this forum. If you are really interested in seeing them all I will send emails. The pictures are going to be posted at the end of this blog so that you have some incentive to read to the end, unless you just scroll down, in which case; enjoy!

As far as looking into how medicine is done in Japan I must admit I did little to none of such checking. I spent the whole time as a tourist taking pictures of everything. I did learn some things about how military medicine works, but those points are more procedural and administrative than pharmaceutical. One of the coolest things I learned was about a program that is known as 'Flight Doc' where you are part of the Air Force flight crew, but you get to practice medicine too. That sounded rather awesome to me because I could get to fly in F16 fighter planes and such, but still be a doctor. So, I am looking into that as a short-term long-term goal - can't do that forever you know.

Internship stuff plugs along nicely. Today I am going to work on making some new paper surveys for anti-bacterial medications like Penicillin, Amoxicillin, Erythromycin etc. Those are both interesting and I think that almost no one in western medicine has not used them. I plan on taking these surveys to the people who live in my apartment complex sometime later this week. That should get me some more information, and might help to shape my final analysis. Also today I need to re-read the information that was sent to me regarding the 'Page Manager Program' with www.rateadrug.com so I can ask any and all questions that come to mind. It sounds like an interesting program.
So, look to this space next week - maybe later this week - to find more information about medications as I do the 'Drug of the Week' features and get back into the swing of things.

We flew into Narita airport, which is to the East of Tokyo and stayed in a hotel there the first day. Then over the course of the next week we visited sites all over Tokyo and Kyoto. Japan is full of shrines, neat plants, and really cool architecture. They have a way of blending natural things with synthetic things that is just beautiful.
Anyway, without further ado: the awesome photos of Japan!

(This is a photo of Tokyo as seen from an Army base in the center of Tokyo)

(We just thought it was funny how many Kanji symbols it took to say, 'No Smoking')

(This is the Meiji shrine, a Shinto Shrine in the heart of Tokyo)
(This is a neat Azalea bonsai that was at the Meiji shrine. Ever since seeing all of the cool bonsai I have started growing my own from a Trident Maple)
(This is a samurai or guard house on the imperial grounds in Tokyo. I forgot the Japanese word for samurai house; you try looking up words in Japanese on google!)


(This is part of the imperial gardens. All over the place we saw beautiful gardens. When I got back to Utah I realized I really DO live in a desert)


(This is Harajuku, which is sort of like the teen fashion district of Tokyo)


(This is the kabuki theater where we watched a kabuki play. It is sort of like Japanese opera)

(This is me and my wife standing in front of a Buddhist temple in Tokyo)


(This is a picture of Mt. Fuji that I got from the bullet train going to Kyoto. The Japanese term for the bullet train is Shinkanssen)


(These last 2 are of our hotel in Kyoto. The beds are really short, about 18 inches high and really firm. The bathroom was also super small, just to the right of the sink, that is the toilet and the tub was about 3 feet square)


(Now we are at the imperial palace in Kyoto. This is a building from the 15th or 16th centuries (I forget) said to house one of the three national treasures of Japan that are presented to the emperor when he 'takes office')

(Here is an interesting item: the Jell-O soda. It is like a normal soda, only with pieces of gelatin. You have to shake it up before drinking. Sounds kind of weird, but they are addicting. We decided we like the orange flavor better)


(After many attempts to try and understand this prime example of 'Engrish' we think it means that you are not supposed to have open bottles while exploring Nijo Castle in Kyoto. This was on the machine we bought the Jell-O soda from)

(Also in Kyoto at a place known as Gion corner. That is my wife walking with two Miko - they are sort of like Geisha in training. Not the best shot becuase the Miko girls would not stop for a photograph)

(Lastly here is a picture from our hotel room the last night we were in Tokyo. It is like Blade Runner, the city just goes for miles. It is hard to appreciate in this small frame)

Ok, that is about all of the photos from the middle of Japan. At this point in the trip we drove up north to a place called Misawa, where the US Air Force base is located. I will post more pictures of the trip there and stuff we saw there in my next posting. I am sure you are getting sick of looking at pictures, and this post is getting rather long.
So, until then be good my faithful followers!