Apologies for crudeness in the title - this cracked us all up on a restaurant menu this evening. They also had 'the stew that lasts', 'the cucumber is soaked' and 'fry some cabbage and bacon' (well, if you insist). Excellent.
I've now had two days at Naganuma language school, which have been very intense but OK so far. We have three different teachers, all of them very nice thus far - the ever-obliging and smiling Nishimura-sensei (lots of listen and repeat, which is very comforting when you know virtually nothing like me), the massive Sting fan (?!) Toda-sensei, and Ueno-sensei, who talks even quicker than me. There's an awful lot of information being pumped in all at once, but so far I'm enjoying learning. I dare say I'll be griping soon enough, though! Homework at the moment is handwriting practice, quite like the stuff I remember from the early years of infant school. I'm very slowly getting to grips with hiragana and katakana, the two phonetic syllabaries, and can now *mostly* write down words in dictation (another daily activity) if they're said very slowly and repeated several times! Tomorrow we learn our first kanji (Chinese pictogram characters, normally with several different readings) which will be a challenge.
I have a second viewing of a flat tomorrow - if that goes well and I like it as much as I did the first time, and if the landlord doesn't freak out at my being a foreigner (rental racism is rife, as is alliteration), then I should have a provisional move-in date of 10 October. Very exciting! I don't want to get my hopes up too much though, just in case something goes wrong. I'll gladly let you know my address as soon as it's confirmed.
Three of us scholars have been getting futons and other bits and pieces through Sayonara Sales (one of your favourite words, Will G!), the nearest equivalent in Japan to Freecycle, led by Charlotte, scavenger in chief. Yesterday I carried a double futon almost as tall as me, and a lot wider, on three metro lines across the city. Apparently the only bits of me you could see were my hands and feet; otherwise I looked like a walking futon. Today was comparatively easy, with just a single futon on two metro lines. I should note here that Japanese futons don't have a wooden base - designed to go on softer tatami mats, so they don't need one - which is how we managed to transport them, but still, I feel very virtuous for doing so much heavy lifting.
I also went to a proper karaoke bar for the first time - a true Japanese experience. We went after our welcome drinks with the scholars from the year above us... it was fun, overall, though my microphone was accidentally turned off during 'Back for Good' so my practice from the many times I've watched the TCBC video kind of went in vain. We're planning another trip with all of us (not everyone came) some time soon. I will make sure there is no Cher-esque video evidence.
I also have a new laptop! I lost patience and bought a Toshiba one which was on sale for just under 70,000 yen (around 450 pounds) because it was already set up with an English-language operating system and seemed to have quite good specs, from what little I know about computers. It has an inbuilt webcam that does facial recognition, which is very exciting, and apparently it has a very advanced new generation USB drive. I must confess that I have yet to make use of this, but there's plenty of time yet...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment