I had a chance to visit the International Conference for Strongly Correlated Electron Systems in Okayama. It featured a really broad spectrum of scientific discussion both at the oral presentations as well as in the lively poster sessions. Throughout the week I had a number of beneficial discussions about systems with strong spin-orbit coupling, Mott transitions, and frustrated magnets. Perhaps the highlight to me was the prominence of the heat transport measurements as a new window to look at exotic excitations in the strongly correlated electron materials and it will be interesting to see where it goes in a few years.