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M. slept solidly all night, while I got up in the middle and had trouble getting back to sleep. We rose at 07:00, dressed quickly, and went out to get some breakfast at a nearby 7-Eleven. We grabbed some of the packaged onigiri and a couple of random sweet things and headed back to the hotel room. I ate mine, and M. tried the thing that looked like a tiny chocolate muffin, to discover it was crunchy and filled with sweet red bean paste. She decided to leave the rice in the fridge for later, and head out with me towards the convention centre and see if she could find a cafe to have some coffee and pastries for breakfast instead. We walked across the station and there parted ways for the day.
I walked the short distance to the Okayama Convention Centre, and found the meeting room, where I was early, but the Japanese admin had already set up. There were coffee and tea and some simple snacks, including some specialities local to Okayama:
The first part of the meeting was a plenary session for all of ISO Technical Committee 42 Photography, which is the umbrella committee for our technical activities in Working Group 18 on digital photography. The whole committee also includes other working groups dealing with photo printing, image stability, storage, and other issues related to physical photography. This first overall session was essentially administrative, and the first chance for the new chair of TC 42 to lead a face-to-face plenary meeting after the 2021 meeting was replaced by a fully virtual meeting due to COVID.
After that plenary session we had the opening session of the WG 18 meeting, again more administrative stuff. The main thing for me was discussion and planning of the meeting scheduled for Sydney in October 2024. We needed to decide on the dates, bearing in mind things like technical conferences that some members may be attending around the same time of the year, so there are no travel clashes. We decided on the week of 14-18 October, 2024.
During the lunch break I went by myself to a curry house not far away and had a Japanese curry with vegetables and a fried pork cutlet.
After lunch we had the first technical session. This discussed work on standards related to low light camera performance with simulation of human hand shake (i.e. not using a tripod), the memory model used for storage of digital images by cameras, and definitions of camera pixel-related specifications (like exactly what a megapixel is and how to count them for camera sensors). These sessions took us through to the close for the day, which finished a half hour early, at 16:30.
I messaged M. that I'd be coming back to the hotel early. As I was walking back towards the station from the convention centre, I ran into her coming the other way to meet me there. I showed her a good looking coffee shop that I'd just discovered a minute earlier while walking the most direct route to the station (in the morning I'd taken a bit of a roundabout way to get there and missed seeing this place). Then we walked back across the station to the hotel.
We rested for about an hour and then went out for dinner. I wanted to try an okonomiyaki place that I'd found with reviews saying they did a good vegetarian version. It was just around the corner from CBD Green where we had dinner last night, and in fact we'd walked around to have a look at it then. It was a little hard to tell which place it was, as there was no English signage at all, but it looked popular with a queue of people waiting for tables. So we went a bit early tonight to hopefully beat the queues.
When we got there, the place only had two tables occupied out of about ten, so we were seated and they turned the hotplate in the middle of our table on to heat up. The waitress apologised that they didn't have menus in English. I said we wanted okonomiyaki and M. was vegetarian, and she said that was okay. She went down a list of options: beef, pork, prawns, squid, mix, and also the same again with noodles. We opted for the plain versions, I got the mix and M. the vegetarian. We were looking forward to cooking them ourselves on the hotplate, but we noticed a guy cooking things on a bigger hotplate at the kitchen/bar area. One set of cooked noodles came out for one of the other tables and they put it on their hotplate and turned it down to just keep it hot. Then soon after they brought our already cooked okonomiyaki over and did the same.
Oh well. We still got to add our own sauce and mayonnaise and kelp flakes, and bonito shavings on mine. And it was really good. Although they were a little on the small side compared to other places where I've had okonomiyaki before. But they were very inexpensive. The whole meal, plus a glass of beer for me came to only ¥21,000, or about A$21.
We explored a little further down the street where the restaurant was, as it looked interesting, with dozens of other small restaurants lining the sides. We circled back around towards our hotel and M. picked up a chocolate adzuki cookie thing like she'd had this morning. Then we walked back to the station, where earlier we'd seen a take-away crepe place, with a queue of people waiting to order. I fancied one of those for dessert to make the total dinner more substantial. When we got there, there was still a long queue, and I realised why when I saw a sign that indicated that the place was having a one-day sale, and all crepes were only ¥390. In fact, the queue was even longer than it looked, because we saw a young couple try to join on the end, only to be escorted by a staff member outside the food hall area, to an additional roped off queuing area out in the main station concourse, where more customers were already waiting! So... we decided not to bother queuing up for crepes, and I got a Belgian waffle from another place nearby, a peach and strawberry one. I waited until we got back to the hotel to eat it, and it was very good - crisp crust, chewy interior, and good strawberry flavour in the waffle itself, topped with a peach cream.
We also stopped in at a 7-Eleven on the way to get some onigiri for me for breakfast, which I can keep in the hotel room fridge overnight. M. grabbed a couple of bread products for her breakfast. And back in the hotel we showered and prepared for another earlyish night, with hopefully a solid sleep for myself this time.
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