At a quarter past eight, we are ‘bright and early’ on the bus to the convention centre.

Luckily we have had a hearty breakfast and a few cups of coffee, because we are in for a morning full of speeches. We listen to some interesting talks. We hear about the suddenly deceased Ralph Kiggel (our new hero), a crazy Irish translator, and Tuula Moilanen, who comes to talk about a papermaking workshop in Finland. It all sounds very inspiring.

The obligatory group photo is taken. An interesting morning, but I have a hard time concentrating.

Some extra energy comes from the tasty bento box at lunchtime. I sneak a quick look around to see how the others are arranging the food with their chopsticks. The box contained very small and quite large pieces. Not obvious to eat with chopsticks. But we manage :)

We are not doing well in the paper testing workshop. We notice a lot of differences with our way of printing. We can’t get a decent print. Terry is running this workshop. Next week we will work in his studio and he will teach us. We feel a bit stupid but immediately have a bunch of extra questions for next week.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere at the conference is getting looser and more friendly. Everyone is mingling, people are joining up with each other at the table, on the bus and so on. Nice.

We end up going to the only restaurant still open. Can’t be bad: the cook (well past retired age) is wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt. The landlady is funny. Apart from two surprised locals, the restaurant is full of mokuhangalovers. We kneel down at the table as three Japanese girls come to our table. We recognise them as ‘helpers’ from the conference. They order for us in Japanese. It turns out that they are between 38 and 48 years old. They are not students, as we thought. There is a lot of chatting going on back and forth with them. They like our business cards and stickers. A little later it turns out that Vladimir knows a Japanese friend of theirs who lives in Belgium. Small world, eh?

Portfolio tomorrow. We finish off the evening in the lobby of the hotel and fold a few more portfolios for our prints to go. Deadline fanatics.

Between dinner and folding we also did our laundry, so we’ll be all clean for tomorrow.

Good night!