Compliments Japan Style

Sorry it was just too good!

Sometimes there can be break downs in communication between teacher and student, caused by a combination of language deficiency and sometimes quite serious cultural chasms. An old man was attending my class on compliments, when I asked him to give me an example, perhaps something nice he would say to his wife, he looked quizzical and told me, "My wife is old and fat." Well what can you say to that?

I have finally been paid a full salary cheque so now self indulgence can reassert itself. Even better the money arrived on the same day I discovered that South Africa had lost to Ireland, a very very special day.

I have also now experienced Kareokee. Not in a huge corporate club either. Jon and I went for a quite drink last week, predictably it was anything but and as we were walking back form the train he mentioned that he had seen a kareokee bar 'around here somewhere' we never found the one he meant. But we did discover a tiny little place run by a woman who had clearly had her 15 minutes of fame judging from the rosettes and pictures on the walls. We managed to sing and drink exactly the amount of money we had left which was quite an achievement of good luck! The bar also doubles as a cook your own food restaurant so it might well merit another visit just for that.

Japanese men are rather like Italians they live with there parents until they find a wife to look after them. It seems that some peoples parents are so delighted with this arrangement as there is an organisation that does a kind of speed dating for parents who want to off-load their children. You'd have to worry if you were relying on your mum to hook you up!

Some things are quite disturbing, sometimes when channel hopping on the TV one comes across the strangest stretching exercises. Is not so much that they are stretching that is weird more the way they twist and bounce around like little rubber dolls. Or the spooky counting people who have turned up around the station in the last few days. They sit on chairs on every corner and tap away counting everyone, I think they have different catorgares of counting they all seem to have about 5 or six counting machines. It feels a little like the secret police are onto me. Paranoid me? Never.

And here to end on a cheerful note is a very impressive selection of Origami boxes, courtesy of Jim and Maki (they all fit into each other like Russian dolls).

What a lot of boxes.