It's been over a month, but I'm finally taking the time to give another update! No drastic changes or events in the past month, but rather a slow progression of what'd already been ongoing in the last update. I've settled in my sharehouse, and as flatmates we've done a number of nice things together (which I also took pictures of!). The first one was a dinner, where I cooked (Dhal) for my flatmates as well as the house owners, who live above us on the third floor.

Some weeks ago we had dinner together at a soup curry restaurant in the neighborhood, and headed to an Izakaya (japanese traditional pub) afterwards. Unfortunately I neglected to take pictures of the whole place, as it looks quite interesting. The tables are inset into the ground, which makes for a cozy atmosphere. There are some pictures on TripAdvisor which may give a better idea: Shirubee

Right now the cherry trees are in full view, so the other day, which was a public holiday (spring equinox), we went to Komaba park and enjoyed the atmosphere! This was the right kind of relaxing after a night out, including drinks at the 'Muscle Girl bar', and Karaoke, for Alice's (flatmate from the UK) birthday.

On the way back I took another couple of pictures of the neighborhood, just a minute from our house. The garden is just two houses next door, and is tended to fairly regularly, by whom I assume are some local residents.

Next to these excursions, I'm still mostly at the coworking space, working on my current project - a loop station for musicians (especially drummers). My band (we're somewhat converging on the name 'Ayashii', which is a japanese word for 'mysterious') finally found a bassist! Tsuya-nii, a friend of mine from the coworking space, has joined us, meaning we've probably reached our final lineup. Our first song is close to being done, which we'll finish working on with a friend of Ben and Anne's, who's a rather famous producer. I'll be sure to share it here once it's done!

I've also started taking Japanese lessons again - the local volunteer center hosts 1.5h one-on-one lessons every week for an incredible 500yen (about 4 euros) a month, which I had signed up for and now finally received a tutor. I've met Junko, my teacher, for the first time this Wednesday, and found the lesson very useful!

For now, I think things are not going to change by much - hopefully the band will progress nicely, I would be happy to start playing gigs in May. My looper is already quite functional, but next up I need to build a good user interface for it. This will come in the form of a physical interface which can be hit with drumsticks (it might look just a little like this Roland SPD-SX (just as a MIDI controller driving my software). I could of course buy one, but given its price I decided to head towards Akihabara (nicknamed 'Electric Town') soon to buy the components to build one myself.