So three Fridays ago, my friends and I went out to eat Indian food near our school. Who knew Japan had Indian restaurants owned by Japanese/English speaking Indians? It was a strange experience; like we were stepping into another country. We were their only business at the time though and seeing as how there were around 15 of us I’m sure they were delighted to see us. After we ate, a few of us went shopping at Nishinomiya gardens. Though it’s always too expensive to actually get anything it’s a nice place to walk around. We met our friend Shogi on the train so we convinced him to join us and then after we got bread and ice cream, he showed us a nice place to have a couple of drinks.
That upcoming week was midterms, so I spent much of that weekend studying. Only the ryuugakusei had midterms which was a bit unfair. So that Monday brought me my first: Linguistics. It really wasn’t too bad after all. After that we went into town to Coldstone for our friend’s birthday. We all chipped in for an ice cream cake and it was promptly demolished by in about 10 minutes.
The next day there was host family party hosted by our school so our host families could meet our friends and their parents. They provided us pizza, onigiri (with fish eggs. Eww), fruit, etc. As I was talking to my mom in Japanese, one of her friends whose host student doesn’t know too much Japanese was listening and said, “You can speak with her so smoothly, that’s so nice…” with a longing tone which was funny.
As extra practice for Japanese I’ve been reading harry potter with my friend Hitomi. She reads it aloud and then I attempt to explain it in Japanese and gestures. It’s really a lot of fun; we’re getting through about four pages a session. =)
My tutoring sessions have gotten better as well. This one girl has a really strict English teaching mother and whenever she tries asking her for help, her mom says, “why don’t you get it?!” and she’s like, “I’m sorry… I don't get it at all…. ><.” So in order to help her with expressing opinion and understanding grammatical structures, I told her to write an essay based on an opinion question from her book and then I’ll fix it when she comes in and help her incorporate grammar points. So for this session I was explaining the difference between “a” and “the” and when to use them, which is actually a lot harder than it sounds but I think I managed alright. Then we got off topic to American candy and Japanese candy – skittles, twizzlers, mnms, lays chips, Tostitos and salsa, a lot of which they had never heard of!
From about Wednesday on, it got MAJORLY cold in Japan. Within one day, it dropped about 10 degrees so I can really feel winter coming on now. I’ve started bundling up with scarves and long-sleeved shirts. That day I had my Japanese conversation midterm. It went rather well. I used a lot of grammar points, and she was impressed enough to invite me to an E class event the next Tuesday where you only talk in Japanese so we’ll see how that goes. Then we added one more Japanese person to our Harry Potter reading so that was fun! I love it!
Friday brought on the end of tests. And although the kanji tests went extremely well, the grammar portion was eight pages and extremely painful. At least it’s over. The ryuugakusei were hosting a Halloween party that day but it was pretty lame; good food though (yummy cookies, pumpkin pie). Afterwards, everyone went to sannomiya for eating and shopping. We split up into two groups and I completely went with the wrong one. The first one I was with went to a crappy Indian restaurant that was overpriced and unsatisfying. So I changed groups and went shopping for a little bit and then ate at a yakisoba (fried noodles) place, which was cheap and delicious! We had fun playing a game that Patrick and Greg made up where you find someone who has a funny or unique look about them and then make-up a name and back story that looks fitting. This resulted in Professor Twin Steagle and Baker Afferforte, two chaps from England who are a Chemistry Professor and Investment banker, respectively. After dinner we hung out in the main square and ran into some drunk ryuugakusei which was extremely entertaining.
Word of the Day: 中間試験, "ちゅうかんしけん” chuukanshiken, or Midterms.
それではまた次回!
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