Texts, White Boards, Classes!

(pagoda at Miyajima)

Well, the second set of classes have started. These are the Tuesday classes. They will be my one tie between Ube and Hikari when I move in two weeks. For, when I'm in Ube, almost every Tuesday will begin with my boarding a train for an hour long commute to teach one beginner class at Hiraoi and one intermediate class at Nijigaoka. I really enjoy spending time with my students, but there is a little panic in all of this.

                          Still, God has seen me through some pretty, um, tricky times. Like that Japanese phone conversation, which lasted, maybe, three minutes before the person on the other end realized a strategic withdrawal was needed. Then there were the frequent times during the happy days of Miss A. and Miss. I. when three heads proved less sufficient than one. This happened so often in the context of taking the trains that Mr. Toothey got into the habit of asking us if we had "saw our favorite station" every time we rode them. Even now Kushigahama is a byword among us, because we managed to accidently get off there once. If I ever say that I "got off at Kushigahama" you may take it to mean that I made an awful blunder of some kind. 

In other news, I can now hold a tentative conversation in Japanese, provided the subject is either the weather or someone's health*. Or dates. I think I can understand three different ways of asking "when are you leaving Japan?" My answer never has to change. じゅにがつまでいます**。Still, if I'm felling really fancy I pop out my alternative answer, the one I used to give before I realized there was a shorter way. じゅにがつじゅいちにちにかえります。Despite all this progress, I still can not communicate with the son of my first Homestay, whom I think of as Latin***. The only thing we can talk about are my "つめながい”。(Apparently, I have "long nails").

* This asterisk really only applies to Ms. Theo Shaw, my sister, who loves watching My Fair Lady and should've recognized the reference immediately.　

** The first sentence is, roughly translated, "I'm staying until December". The second means "I return home on December eleventh". If you can't already, I encourage you to learn to read hiragana. I guarantee you, it's easier than learning to read French

*** Latin gets his name in a rather strange way. He loves pokemon, which I found amusing, since, not long ago, I too played around with pokemon paraphernalia. Of course, in my day there were only a hundred and fifty pokemon.... Anyway, I was a little suprised to find that quite a few pokemon names were derived from English words. For instance, Charazard, to name only one, is "rizadon" the katakana form of "lizard." Latin did not seem impressed to learn this piece of information. He wanted to know why they had to have English names. I could only shrug my shoulders and tell him that English speakers ask the same question about the Scientific Naming System. But then, I added, it would be rather confusing to have the tiger's official name be "yellowish-animal-that's-fast-as-an-arrow."