Miscellaneous things about Tsukuba and Japan (3)

It's raining again, so today, I'll post about my raining day topics. Having lived here for a few weeks, there's not really anything surprising anymore, so it took quite a while to collect the contents for the Miscellaneous series.

Robot Zone
Throughout the Koen Dori (lit. "Park Road"), there are signs saying "Robot Zone". If my Japanese is not wrong, it basically says "Two meters around here will be used for robot experiments. If a robot approach you, please be careful. If you don't like being near robots, please walk on the other side." I have never seen an experiment though.

Closed on Monday
Here, many public facilities and exhibits, such as the Tsukuba Science Square or the public library, which are open on weekends are instead closed on Monday.

Supermarket Checkout Pipelining
At supermarkets here, the checkout machine is separated into a barcode scanning machine and a payment machine. So while the credit card payment is being processed or the customer is searching for change, the clerk can start scanning the next customer's product.

Slow Television
I'm not sure if it's because the television in my room has a slow CPU or due to technical limitation of having to wait for a keyframe, but changing channels is very slow and that can be quite annoying when channel-surfing.

Semi-automatic door
Automatic doors are quite popular here, but not all doors are fully automatic. Some automatic sliding doors don't use sensors, instead, you have to push the button for it to open. Talking about doors, Lawson is the only convenience store I've been to that uses a swinging door instead of an automatic sliding door. (Which left me standing waiting for the door in front of Lawson before realizing that I have to open it myself!)