First things first

Hello and welcome my blog! :)

If you are reading this, you'll probably know or noticed that I'm going to Japan for a year. And you'll probably know that I'm Kata from Finland.

A short story if you are too lazy to check this and this:
I'm a freshly graduated Master of Science (Technology) majoring in Electrical Systems. (Power Systems and High Voltage Engineering to be exact.) I'm going to Japan for a year on "Vulcanus in Japan" programme starting this September. We'll spend four months in Tokyo on a Japanese language course and after that we'll have an eight-month internship in a company. I'm going to work at Hitachi Research Lab in Hitachinaka Hitachi, 2 hours north from Tokyo.

We still have two whole months before landing to Tokyo on September 1st, but since we will soon have the Pre-Departure Brief (PDB) of the Vulcanus programme in Brussels I decided to create this blog already.

In this Brussels meeting we get a lot of info which I assume contains for example the details of our accommodation in Tokyo as well as the files for applying for the visa.

This will also be the first time to meet the other Vulcanus participants. There are at least 44 of us this year, though not all rows in our Vulcanus Google Docs file are filled so it might be that we have the maximum 50 participants this year as the last person selected seems to have the number 50. We'll see how it is in Brussels. Some Vulcanus statistics for '15-'16 can be found here.

Exactly one week to the meeting and weather forecast looks like this:


A nice +30°C for wearing business casual... Good thing the dress code isn't business.

Anyway, I'm excited to go to Brussels, have some more info and meet people. Of course I'm also excited to eat some Belgian waffles and chocolate as well as those super delicious macarons of Ladurée (I thought I hated macarons before I tasted ones from this shop).

I'll write more after the meeting. :)