Japanese for Dummies

It has been another crazy few weeks in Japan-land. I'm beginning to realize how very horrible I am at updating the ol' blog. From now on I am going to post at least once a week. If you find this proclaimation dubious, don't take my word for it, believe it to be true because it's on the internet, and everything on the internet is true.

In upcoming events, yours truly is entered in a speech contest and will be pitted against other JETs in the Oita City area in a test of Japanese language ability. If my daily conversations in Japanese are any indication of my performance in this contest, you can be assured that I will be coming home with a shining ribbon of participation. Before coming back to Japan I had very little idea what the experience of being castrated would be like, however, I now think I have a pretty clear picture. It goes something like this: there is something that you really, really, really want to do and once had the means and ability to do it, but now, in your post-castration gloom, you find yourself utterly powerless to do as you would like. With no pun intended of course, one might say that you are impotent to effect the action that you desire most :) Such is the state of my Japanese. There was a time when I could chat away with host mom and host sister and not sound developmentally disabled. But that was then and this, sadly, is now and I would pay big bucks just stutter out a "konnichiwa" without a hideous American accent. It's somewhat discouraging that I can understand 80% of what people spit out at me but can use only 1.29043% of that grammar in my own speech. Not that good by any standards really. So, in the name of not sounding like an idiot any longer (I know, I know, it's alaready been 22 years and running) I started attending Japanese tutoring sessions once of week and Lee and I began going to Japanese conversation classes (free!) every Thursday night. So, hopefully by the time I go to visit the host family I will have reachieved the ability to say hello. We'll see.

On other topics, I would like to report that although I was worrried that it would be a hard transition going from living in Canton and DeRuyter to living in a city of 460,000 people, I have made the transition with seeming ease. I have become a bona fide city-boy as is witnessed by my eating out every day, abilty to weave in and out of pedestrian traffic on my bicycle, and my taking up shopping (albeit shopping at the dollar store) as a hobby. Also, last week I got an expensive city-boy haircut that included a shampoo and scalp massage. It was done by a guy who worked at a salon in America for 4 years and so knows how to cut foreigners' hair. As such, I am neither bald nor have a mullet!!! You can ask nothing more of a haircut in Japan.

Well, now it seems it is time for the requisite picture of Japanese something or another included in every post. This week's spotlighted images are two 10th to 13th century Buddhist carvings located in a town 45 minutes away called Usuki. Lee and I borrowed bicycles (a fun, free service) from the train station and toured around the on our holiday last Monday. So, without further ado:





Until next time, sayonara!