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Published: April 27th 2009
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I woke up today and thought to myself...why is my voice all scratchy? This isn't normal. Then I realized that wow...I think I just hit a milestone in my language study. Went out with the circle at 1:30 in the afternoon yesterday and came back at 10pm that night. No english was spoken. And I talked enough to burn my voice out a bit...now that is cool.
Today was the big welcome for the new students that decided to join the circle. Stuff before was just to drum up interest so we had plans for going to a fair trade shop, bowling, and then dinner and a fancy place called umeko (food was so-so)
The day started off great and just kept getting better. I learned how to say properly in Japanese "the more I improve in the language, the more I can enjoy the circle" recently and got to use that phrase a lot today. It's absolutely true. Weather was beautiful, 75 and sunny. We met up as a group (19) in front of Meiji Jingu shrine. I got my chance (and did) to scare the crap out of the new, timid members because a few of them
hadn't seen me before. I saw the group gathering, walked up right next to two new members, said hello and started intoducing myself. The looks of panic were priceless. Embarrassed they turned to the nearest Japanese person for some confirmation that I was either part of the group (the only foreigner) or not insane. After they got the confirmation that 1. I was not deadly and 2. I could speak Japanese (yeah, they asked that to one of my friends in the circle as I was standing there speaking Japanese to them) they calmed down a bit but one of them still got this look of panic when she looked at me in the eye throughout the whole day. The other one was fine afterwords. Other than that incident, after I was introduced to the few new members that hadn't seen me before by a Japanese person first, things went well. I think we got 6 new members in total which is awesome.
From there we walked down Omote-sando to one of the few fair-trade stores, mostly dealing with clothes, but picked up some sweet info on an organic fair next month. Conversation came easy, with both new and
Ume-ko
Food was this type old members. This is what I've been wanting to happen, its almost like communicating in sort of a surreal, 2nd world because here I am speaking, but its not English and any point of the process.
From there moved to a bowling alley in Shinagawa for an all you can throw hour and a half, and again, just talked as I would talk to people in English, but in Japanese. 1-on-1 convo is great, groups up to 4 I can handle as well. Any larger gets a little tough, especially when the convo gets a little detailed where I can understand the flow of it, but the subject is about something pretty specific like the dress of the Waseda and Keio students and how they differ plus the history behind it. Lots of new words that probably wouldn't appear in a dictionary even if I had one. BTW...bowled a 100 for the first time in probably about 12 years. My little 5 year old pee-wee league bowling self was pretty impressive back in the day.
Dinner at this place ume-ko was so so. Very fancy, esoteric decorations, all kinds of cushions and mats on the floor and tables.
Most of the place was divided into squares and booths while our section was cordoned off by these hanging bamboo rods that made a ton of noise when you passed through. Impressive to look at, but really a pain to go in and out. There were about 20 varieties of ume-shuu (plum wine) and we all had our share because it was all you can drink for 2 hours although we stayed at the place for about 4. In a larger setting sometimes got lost a bit in the convo, but I think for the first time I was able to participate in the melee talk that goes on around tables. In a smaller group, I learned about the college system here, how the engineer/econ types get paid less than the humanities types, exactly the opposite, and that to get into the school, you essentially chose between having english as part of your study or math. Can't do both ways. Then for some retarded reason I started to talk about the change in the law education system and medical insurance (stuff from a SILS class) - in Japanese. Really stuff I wasn't prepared language-wise to get into but hell, I
Couldn't resist
Met up at Meiji-jingu, prime cosplay territory was having a good time and decided to give it a shot. Actually, for advanced material, it wasn't a train-wreck, although I didn't know how to say "sue" in Japanese at the time.
And that is how I got a sore throat. I love my circle. Ton of fun, very different people, all of them. Get to talk about music, science, law, ramen, you name it someones into it. I am so grateful to them for letting me in when my japanese was pretty horrible back in November. Going to miss them a ton in less than 3 months (time flies) and I hope periodically they come do the tourist thing in NY or PA.
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mom
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first time I was thrilled to hear you had a sore throat!! Great blog/ love you xo