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Not what I expected! I have not got a huge amount of work to report on as I was stuck inside revising all weekend and on Monday AND on Tuesday. I had a lot of revision to do for my JSDA Sales Representative 2 exam, as I had attended the course last week and had lots of past papers to go over. I did try to get outside and study in the nice weather though: I went to Yoyogi-koen (the big park in Harajuku) to sit in the sun and work, but gave up after about two hours as the insect world kept invading my workspace. There were far too many ants for my liking!

I had the JSDA Sales Representative Class 2 exam on Wednesday morning. It could have been worse but, unfortunately, the questions that I found the trickiest also happened to be the questions that were worth the most marks. Unfortunately, I found out on Friday morning that I had failed the exam. I was really frustrated about this for a while (I've got over it now) as I had worked really hard for it, was doing well in the past papers and thought that I'd answered enough correctly on the day to pass it. Oh well... Completing the course and sitting the exam were good experiences and will still be making an appearance on my CV.

I spent Thursday and Friday with the structures desk again, this time looking at the products in more detail. I spent a lot of time working out how to make different pay-out structures using combinations of simple put and call options and then establishing the range of delta and gamma (used to asses risk) for different moves in the spot price. This was really interesting or me to practice doing and it made it a lot easier to understand the whole process of hedging individual trades and portfolios by analysing these so-called 'Greeks'.

After work on Friday, the guys on the structures desk and I headed over to Azubu Juban to check out the 10-bang matsuri (no idea why it's called that, but '10' is 'ju' in Japanese, so 10-bang sounds kind of like Juban, and matsuri is just a word for a festival). It was really cool - loads of stalls selling different food and drink and also a few with the usual funfair games. In the main square, there was a stage set up with a samba band and lots of dancers from the local samba school. The music was good and the costumes were brilliant. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed my first matsuri. I only wish that I lived in Tokyo so I could go to more - each district throws its own every summer.

I woke up stupidly early on Saturday morning so I could head to Hakone for the day, essentially with the aim of taking a bath. Hakone sits at the top of the Izu peninsula and is surrounded by active volcanoes, which provide fantastic hot springs that you can bathe in - it is these onsen that make Hakone a famous tourist destination. I explored the area by every means of transport possible – 3 different types of train, a funicular, cable car, bus and a full-sized plastic replica of a pirate ship (only in Japan…).