We had the first online party of our research group! It was a quite different experience, but we had drinks and food together. The new members introduced themselves and took the chance to tell us something about their hometown and interests.
We discovered that Zhongyu Yu is originally from Harbin, a city in the north of China towards the border with Russia. There is a lot of Russian influence in the architecture and they have a beautiful festival of ice statues of which she showed us some pictures.
After this, Giordano gave us a virtual tour of his hometown Rome, in Italy. It was very interesting to be able to see a new place, while sitting comfortably in our homes. This is definitely a plus of “virtual” parties where everyone can share his own screen and show some media content. We also have to thank Google Maps for making freely available 3D reconstructions of cities: in this difficult moment, it is a powerful tool for travelling directly from our homes!
As for every respected party, we also had drinks and a cheer all together. The whole Yonezawa family participated with some non-alcoholic drinks which looked like real beer! Kitagawa-san introduced us to his new son who joined our party in a very angelic mood.
After the food, we played some online games. To break language barriers, we had some drawing game where everyone had to take part of a bigger drawing. The game was called “Fake artist” and it was a fun play!
The drawings became more professional in the following rounds. Ikeda-san was often the fake artist and we were uncertain about his drawing skills or his identity in the game. Giordano was the fake artist in the last game on the right, and could not guess the “tape”, in a very amazing drawing job made be the real artists!
It was an interesting way of getting together with the whole group. Even if we all hope that the coronavirus crisis will be ending soon, we enjoyed spending a different evening together and welcoming the new members.
