Fabian Suchanek, colleages from MPI, and I published a resource paper about YAGO and its new evaluation at ISWC 2016 in Kobe. The evaluation took place during several months in 2015, and the conference would allow us to announce the results to the community. So we wrote the paper in the beginning of 2016, and I would present it in Kobe.
I would use the occasion to visit Japan for some weeks, as I never went to Asia before. Antoine Amarilli gave me the tip to play with the flight matrix search to include a long lay-over in Beijing, and/or Shanghai. Some Chinese cities allow a (72h or 144h) visa free visit of the city, if the traveler arrives from, and departs to a different country than China. I found a round-trip with Air China with two days in Beijing, and two days in Shanghai.
Our school likes bureaucracy, so in order to get refunded for the trip I had to fill out a form to ask for a mission, and tell the secretary which flights I want to take. Some days later I received a mail from a different person at Telecom ParisTech who told me that the agency couldn’t book the flights for the long layover in Beijing, and so I would just stay 2 hours in Beijing. The same mail asked me for a “reply validating the ticket”. As I didn’t mind two more days in Japan, I accepted the ticket. (This would lead to problems later)
I searched what to do in Japan, and decided to go to autumn festivals (matsuri). I managed to make a travel plan including the matsuris in these cities: Takayama, Tokyo, Hyogo, and Kyoto. I would take three times a night bus from Willer Express. I would also stay some days around mount Fuji to go for hiking, and going to a hot spring (onsen).
Japan has time zone GMT:+9, and Paris GMT:+2, so the time when I normally go to bed in Paris (around midnight) corresponds to 7 a.m. in Japan. So I started to adjust my biorhythm several days before my departure by going to bed and getting up one hour earlier every day. The table shows what I managed to do:
| Day | Going to bed | Waking up (next day) |
|---|---|---|
| 2016-09-26 (Monday) | 11pm | 8am |
| 2016-09-27 (Tuesday) | 10pm | 7am |
| 2016-09-28 (Wednesday) | 10pm | 6am |
| 2016-09-29 (Thursday) | 11pm | 5am |
| 2016-09-30 (Friday) | 1am | 4am |
As you can see, I managed to stick to the scheduled waking-up times. But I always have a lot of things on my TODO list, so I didn’t to go to bed in time. Especially on Friday, where Luis Galarraga invited us to celebrate his PhD defense. Before and after going to the get-together, I also had to pack my backpack (resulting in 15kg).