Wednesday, March 26, 2008

"The sky is crying, water will make the road."

Housekeeping: I'll switch doing pictures over to the webhost I usually use, Photobucket, since the program that blogspot automatically uploads pictures with doesn't seem to work. I've fixed the time zone stamp so it should show the time I'm actually posting instead of something random like 4 in the morning. I've allowed anonymous comments to be posted - sorry if anyone had to create an account just to reply to me.

I'm sorry that I don't reply directly back to your comments, but that's really not an option on blogspot. (I've been spoiled by livejournal where you can have back-and-forth comment conversations.) I could theoretically just post below yours, but then... who seriously would bother looking back at a post to see if they got a reply? Mhm, didn't think so. If it's important you know my email.

 

Most Japanese words have kanji, picture-characters based on Chinese. Days of the week have 曜日 - pronounced youbi - preceded by a kanji with a specific meaning, some familiar. Sunday, for example, is nichiyoubi - where nichi means sun. Monday is getsuyoubi - moonday. Tuesday is kayoubi - fire-day - and Wednesday is suiyoubi - water-day. Studying my flashcards this evening, this seemed rather appropriate, since today I have had a good deal of wrestling with water. First it was doing my laundry - Japanese homes don't have dryers, so a quarter of my wardrobe is now draped variously over my room. Then for dinner I managed to splash all over - it's hard to juggle things with zero counter space. Now it's thundering outside - or that might be my upstairs neighbor snoring.

I went on a mission today - to find a can opener. I was armed with the kanji written down on a piece of paper above a small sketch of what I thought a can opener looked like, and I knew the phrase to ask - "Kankiri ga arimasu ka?" Do you have can openers? I went to the yen store becaue I searched the supermarket yesterday, and walking down the kitchen utensil aisle comparing my kanji to the packaging on each tool I realized I'd passed over what I thought was a bottle-cap remover because it was so tiny. Anyway, now I can eat my canned fruit in peace.

As though the Ibaraki incident wasn't enough, today there was a boy (Japanese policy is to only identify underage criminals as "shounen") who pushed a man in front of a train. The hardest part to watch is the interview with his father.

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