Entries this day: A_bit_of_Japanese Miki_miki_miki With_Mika,_Francois_heads_to_Egypt! asakaze essay_aoi

A bit of Japanese

9:51am JST Friday 16 March 2007 (day 13505)

I'm meeting Miki in Futakotamagawa today. I headed down to the train platform and heard the Japanese announcement of the arriving train. "Huh? why is this train.... oh!!" and I looked up to confirm, and saw 渋谷, I had gone to the platform headed toward Shibuya!

Went back upstairs and *just* caught the train going the right direction. Had I missed it, I would have been late. (*)

(*) Actually not late, because Futakotamagawa is so close to my station, (!) but still.. the point is that I understood Japanese both spoken and written in a useful realtime situation!

(!) the train stopped before reaching the station; a bit of congestion, it seems. But still no worries.

Miki miki miki

11:53am JST Friday 16 March 2007 (day 13505)

Great to see Miki. She described her husband as "big" and his age as "secret"

I hope she's happy. それだけ。

Miki told me how she decided to go to Nova because Carla was her teacher at the initial lesson. I whipped out my camera and put it on video mode, "can you say that again?" and went through about 4 minutes of recording her squirming about being on camera and blah blah blah, but I got her to at least nod yes when I reviewed the story in English.

She grabbed the camera after a bit and recorded me saying HI to Carla and wishing her a happy Carla White Day and then introducing Francois a bit.

10:20pm JST

She ended up convincing me to delete the part of the video where she appeared, because she would re-record a message in a more poised manner. I did what I thought was the right thing, but it deleted the part of the video where *I* appeared. I was pissed for a bit, but then was like, fuckit and deleted everything so we could just do it all again.

There's a part of me that wanted to have captured the moment in the raw, in real time, with spontaneity and the whole perfect youtube style.

We ended up with a fine couple of vids, I'm sure:

- - - -

Met her sister for lunch at the nearby Chinese restaurant, which wasn't disgusting with smoke when we went in, but was before our order was far in progress. I told them sorry and ducked out. I didn't want to smell disgusting all day at work.

I said bye to Miki who came outside with her sister's baby for a bit and waved to her sister.

With Mika, Francois heads to Egypt!

5:01pm JST Friday 16 March 2007 (day 13505)

I *just* sent Francois off with Mika, the ninja who made his shirt. She is going to Egypt for 4 days! He wanted to go with her. See him and her back in 2 weeks.

10:03pm JST Friday 16 March 2007 (day 13505)

Wow. So I'm pretty excited about how this may turn out. I'll have to tell a few peeps, most notably Colleenie Beanie.

I was just wondering how Ami will react when I tell her. If she ever comes back to EV!

asakaze

5:58pm JST Friday 16 March 2007 (day 13505)

Asakaze is 9 years old; I've had lessons with him about 6 times now. I try to combine learning and games in a haphazard way, keeping him guessing as to what may come next.

Today we played BASH; he did relatively well understanding the game, and I think I remembered / created a logical set of rules for the game.

Then we went to the textbook and were reading about Stanley's International Restaurant, and it came to light that Asakaze has no idea where Italy is. Nor China.

I gave him homework of obtaining a world map. We'll see how it goes.

essay aoi

10:01pm JST Friday 16 March 2007 (day 13505)

Aoi wrote me an essay type thing on the difficulty of making friendships in Japanese culture. She basically said it's not just between Japanese and foreigners, but even between Japanese, friendship can be difficult or difficult to understand... but we just trust and help each other as much as possible.