dynamic elf

Last night, we learned how to say "sticky hot" in Japanese class. It was appropriate. Later on, when I commented that my belly was bigger than David's, and he replied with "but my stomach is bigger than yours", the teacher looked confused. Perhaps I STILL don't look pregnant to strangers. That baffles me.

The teacher seems to have noticed that fill-in-the-blanks style exercises just allow us to slack off mightily. This week, I entirely failed to do my homework, and just did it on the fly out loud when we were reading the exercises at the end of class. Not good. During the class, we got her sidetracked in discussions of various sentence structures, so most of the class was in a question-and-answer format rather than just following along in a book. It was, in some ways, the most exciting class we've had yet. As a homework assignment this week, she is having us write a composition on any topic, and then memorize it. Aaah! Brilliant! That is a perfect exercise for where I am, right now. I especially like having to memorize it -- the different structures are more likely to stick in my head, that way.

So, due to lack of time to spend studying, we're not tearing up the earth with this class. On the other hand, we're making steady progress, and that feels good.

We had our first Japanese class last night. When I tried to sign up with the Boston Language Institute for their Level 2 Japanese class, they apologized profusely for not actually having a session running this period and offered to set up a "semi-private" class for just the 2 of us, at the regular rates, and by the way when would we like it scheduled for? Well, then. I'm not exactly going to turn that down. So, now, dilletante and I have a regular 3-hour class on Tuesdays, tailored to just us.

This is both great and bad. I mean, I think that if we'd started right after coming home from Japan, we could have gone right into a level 2 class seamlessly. We both figured that it would still be the place to start, but that we'd spend a week playing catch-up. However, in a classroom with only two students, there's nowhere to hide, even temporarily. So, we told her right off the bat what we'd done, how much we learned, and how much we had already forgotten. She aimed her teaching directly at us, and in fact seemed to work on the same material that she was going to work on anyway. That made me feel a little better.

Actually, it was one of the most inside-out language class experiences I've ever had. When I was in Brittany right after college, I took a week-long intensive Breton class. I'd read a few lessons in a Breton book on my own, but let's just say my grammar and vocabulary weren't going to wow anyone. There were a number of students in my section who had no formal training at all, but who had grown up in a family with at least one Breton speaker and who therefore had a smattering of advanced concepts, beyond what I knew, and a bunch of random vocabulary. I always wondered what that felt like, taking a language class when you already had some grounding in the language, but I figured I'd never feel it, since I grew up in an English-only household. Last night, I think I had a bit of that feeling.

Anyway, I'm excited. That was session #1 of 6, and I think that this class will turn out to have been a great idea.

( ten things I've done this week that you might possibly not have done, unless you are my husband )
I think that this list might be hard for me to make if I weren't in Japan right now. I can think of a whole host of things I've done that not many of you have done, but in general, I prefer to share weird and interesting things with partners and friends, so a lot of you have been there for the good stuff. :) Or, at least, the list I would make might consist entirely of dull things and stuff I did before the age of 18.

We went to a monkey park!

( And guess what? I took pictures! )

We took the trolley to the end of the line, out to the edge of Kyoto, and we were wandering around, realizing that we didn't know how to say "monkey" or "park" or "monkey park" in Japanese, when we found a sign with a cartoony Monchichi thing pointing us down a road to the entrance. It said, in katakana, MANKII PAAKU. Oh! Of course. That's how you say "monkey park". "Monkey paaku!" Similar derivations have been spotted for "melon soda", as well as a thousand other nouns.

Anyway, the monkeys were really cute, walkin' around on their hands like that. I'll let dilletante keep telling the story. Me, I need a nap.

Monkey park!

So many photos! They'll drip in, slowly, I suppose.

The event of the day, in some ways, was going to the nekobukuro. This was a welcome rest, after going to Akihabara, which looked ( crazy-bright. )There really wasn't any escaping it, although we did wind up in a gigantic video-game/manga mall (with a girl game proudly inviting, "Let's Collect Bromides!"), and also a five-story arcade where we played not ONLY House Of The Dead III, but ALSO TYPING OF THE DEAD. Turns out I'm not so hot at hiragana typing games, but -- how could I resist? I mean, really.

Anyway, the nekobukuro. Up on the 8th floor of a Tokyu Hands is a pet shop with this charming little annex. You pay a few bucks, buy a ticket, and go hang out with cats for a while. The cats are rotated in and out of the public areas, where they run around, rub shoulders with the paying customers, and ... well, and mostly they nap. I put up some pictures here, to show how utterly cat-focused this place was. For the most part, the cats were so docile and so used to humans that they barely noticed you were there at all. One of them was clearly aloof and just wanted to get back behind the doors where the scary crazy people couldn't reach him anymore. And then there were these two cute kittens, playing and napping together in this little bin, behind a window. They were darling until one kitten ( totally flipped me off. ) Anyway. Yesterday, the themed-mall fairy brought us the Goth Mall. Sadly, I couldn't take pictures, but I did get ( a billboard outside and a couple of internal window displays. ) Okay. Now back to the shiny. I think it's bar night, tonight. Tomorrow, we head to Kyoto!

dilletante has already chronicled the day so far, but ( here are a few illustrations )

Today has been a good language day. We've conducted transactions in Japanese, and even if we got the words a bit wrong, we still got the right answers. That seems like a success in my book. Also, I learned a few more Kanji place names, and I know maybe half of the katakana by now. It goes! It goes.

In Tokyo!

The plan was to stay up all night so that we'd crash on the plane at a time appropriate for Tokyo-night. What I'd forgotten is that being immersed in another language is ultra-stimulating and ultra-tiring: everything is a test. Looking at road signs is a test. Billboards and station announcements and vending machines are tests. Signs directing you around are tests, and finding a street address is definitely a final exam.

So far, people seem very entertained by our funny hats. I feel like an absurd giantess, 90 degrees rotated from in-fashion because not only am I not wearing ultra-thin pointy spike heels -- apparently, quite in, at least as far as this correspondent can tell -- I'm 9 feet tall, I weigh a thousand pounds, and I'm wearing a hot-pink hat. It's nice. I don't blend at all, which is fun! It means I won't wind up playing the also-stressful game of "can I blend in and look like a native, or at least a native of one-country-over?" since: no. No, I cannot. I can practice my Japanese on these people, but I will be fooling nobody.

We are at Ryokan Asakusa Shigetsu in the Asakusa district iof Tokyo. We got a "Japanese-style" room, which makes me think of all of that time that we slept on the floor. We clearly did not do it in style, as it turns out. At any rate, we adventured through customs and through the airport and through the train to the city, and then through a subway station to the proper train and from our stop to the ryokan, which was enough to knock us out for the evening. Except that I just woke up. Oops.

Bicycles! So many bicycles. Perhaps another time, when my Japanese is more than wishful thinking and a knowledge of the hiragana.

Speaking of which, damn, is this written language confusing. I know the hiragana and *some* of the katakana, and the kanji for Tokyo. But it's kanji, kanji, kanji! I'll read a sign, and it will helpfully tell me something like

[kanji] no [kanji] wa [kanji kanji]!

Or, you know, whatever. Great! Glad I know what those particles are doing to the impenetrable real content of the sentence. It's frustrating to learn that I can't read words I already know how to read in hiragana. Stupid Kanji! Getting in my way!

I mean, it's all thrilling. I'm enjoying what I can understand of the language, and I love the experience of being adrift like this. Tomorrow, we'll get up and wander. We'll eat food, maybe wander through Ginza and one of these legendary department stores, maybe find a museum, certainly brave some restaurants and order sushi and photograph the whole experience. And it will be tiring, and thrilling, and I promise to tell you all about it, mister livejournal.