Earlier this week I was in Tokyo again. Tokyo is a city I always like visiting. Good food, big and always interesting new things for a non-Japanese to discover. One of the interesting bits this time was the line in front of the Doughnut store near ShinJuKu. When I lived in China, I've seen lines in front of McDonalds (not common anymore nowadays though, there are too many McDonalds (unfortunately)) and lines in front of Pizza Hut (still quite common), but never had I seen a line in front of a simple Doughnut shop. My wife thought they must have some special promotion, but I noticed that there were iron fences (for lines), suggesting its common. We asked E. (a friend I work with) and he mentioned it has been there every day ever since the store opened three years ago. Interesting...
Anyways, in Tokyo me and E. were giving the second public Scrum Master training in Tokyo. This time we used simultaneous translation devices (I don't speak Japanese, he translates excellent!). It turned out to work pretty well. I enjoy giving training like that. It has new challenges again since I need to synchronize my talking with my translator and also will sometimes hear an echo in Japanese. (Also have an earphone in my ear the whole training)
Again learned lots of new things about cultures and Scrum. Also visited a couple companies and had some discussion on their Scrum implementations. All-in-all, a successful training (from my perspective), a nice visit and hopefully helped the Japanese Scrum usage a little further.
Now back in the biggest Scrum-country in the world... Finland.
