Entries this day: Noon_nap busy_day niveen

Noon nap

1:53pm CEST Friday 24 June 2005

This is the day after Italy, and 2 days before Barcelona.

I'm feeling stressed about getting my curriculum ready on time (the day after Barcelona, I think).

2:15pm CEST Friday 24 June 2005

I'm going to take a quick nap before my Japanese lesson. I'm tired, or maybe looking for an escape.

busy day

11:16pm CEST Friday 24 June 2005

Today has been a good day. I've gotten a bit done on my curriculum: I basically want to use these 15 days to teach the students a bit of a debate discussion. I wonder if they'll handle it easily. We'll see.

This was the night the magician performed, and the third night of Silent Football. We had 11 participants, including (for the first time) a non-Japanese: Niveen. Hitomi came and helped CC, and we had no issues regarding scuba diving or not. I'm thankful for that. If this keeps up, I'll ask her to dive with me in Acapulco or Costa Rica.

Tomorrow we have one more day at sea before Barcelona, during which time I hope to meet Caesar, though I didn't go to an internet cafe in Italy so I've not gotten any final details from him. I can check internet on the boat, but it's reallly expensive.

I've not put any pictures in my journal entries. That's a dramatically time consuming process that I'd like to get started on.

Tomorrow is our Cinderella play. I'm evil step sister #2. I've learned all my lines I think, and I wrote them all on a postcard to janette. If she gets them translated, I wonder what she (and the translator) will think. The Japanese is apparently very rude.

Tonight I'm supposed to meet Niveen for another lovely chat on the back of the boat at midnight. Before then, I'd like to work a bit more on my curriculum and lesson plans.

I'm on tape 9 for recording and tape 3 for transcribing.

Niveen has invited me to come to Palestine to work for an NGO there. I'm tempted to do it because I'm pretty ignorant of that part of the world.

niveen

1:21am CEST Saturday 25 June 2005

I've just spent two hours talking to Niveen. We didn't get onto the topic of Israeli occupation of Palestine, but instead she showed me the Arabic alphabet. The fucked up thing is the letters change shape depending on where they are in the word. But, that's arguably true for English - they change shape depending on where they are in the sentence.

I showed her the hiragana and a few kanji. 山　川　海

An interesting thing about the Arabic letters is they have similar shapes with different numbers of dots around them. There is some consistency to the chaos of this language.