November eighteenth
This morning I had a nice bowl of yogurt, granola, and honey for breakfast. It as very similar to something I would have at home on a “cold breakfast” morning. It was very good. Afterwards Catherine took Ayana to the tennis courts, and I got Atsushi dressed. When Catherine came home, the three of us sat down to watch Massan. Massan is an NHK drama in Japan, that plays for a series of months, every week day, in the morning and after lunch. But it’s the same episode each time (morning and afternoon), so you can recap, or not worry if you slept in past the first showing. This year is the first year that the show has featured a foreigner as the main character, and her experience living and marrying in Japan. For this reason mainly, Catherine has started watching it, so today I joined her. Despite not really understanding much, I enjoyed it. It’s set in the past, so I enjoy even just looking at the costumes, and the architecture. It’s pretty cool. But apparently watching a tv show on a regular basis in a different language is a good way to learn it. So we’ll call it study time. Well, not really, but it’s still nice to watch. If I was to make it into a study time I should watch the morning, and the afternoon showing, and make notes on words I didn’t know. But I think I’d end up writing the whole script. Speaking of script, something I found interesting was that the actress who plays the main character doesn’t actually speak Japanese. But her Japanese in the show seems so fluent, and the pronunciation is dead on, so I wondered if it was a Japanese voice over. But actually she just learns each line phonetically! I would imagine that would be very hard, as you can’t really understand what everyone else is saying around you (in the actual show), but she must just memorize more or less what her colleagues are saying so she can act off that. It reminded me off Emma Watson, who learned her part for a certain movie in an American accent. She of course is from England, so she had to learn each line phonetically with the right accent. Sounds hard!
After the show I did my blogging. It was nice not to have extra blogging to do this morning, but since I’ve got volleyball I suspect I’m going to be writing this journal tomorrow.
When I finished (which didn’t take very long), I went on Facebook. I wasn’t planning on staying on for long, but I ended up talking to Josephine (Johnny’s sister), and another person (a vegetable costumer who I met at fall pickup). I ended up having good conversations with both people, so I talked for a few hours. As I did so I did a basic workout, read and wrote in my Japanese journal, and had lunch. The joy of texting… For lunch I had a bowl of rice and Mabodofu, and then udon afterwards. Both were very tasty, and I didn’t have any mishaps!
Later in the afternoon I did some review in my Japanese textbook, and Ayako corrected my journal. Most of the sentences were correct, but my res (れ) looked like was (わ). I’ve still got to work on that!
After picking Ayana up from the gorilla around 2:30, I had half an hour to watch parkour videos and get hyped up before Reiko picked me up. We went to a little park together, and we shot a parkour video. It was a really neat place to train, and even though it was my first time there we got some pretty good footage. It was a lot of fun. Then we went back to Reiko’s place, and I started editing and eating Oreos while she made super. We had curry and rice, a delicious salad, and some sort of yummy, crunchy, Japanese vegetable. It was a good meal. After supper I played some wii tennis until it was time to go to volleyball. I haven’t went for a couple weeks, so it was nice to see everyone! Although not everyone was there, only 6/8-9. So we played 3 on 3 for a while. That was of course more challenging, but still a lot of fun. A little while later, a seventh person joined us, so it was 4 on 3. That was great too, and I had some nice plays. Pit was great to see, and play with Reiko again. One of the last times (to see her, and to play volleyball) before I leave!
When I got home, I did a bit more work on the video (you can find it now at http://youtu.be/Nj5I-WPeJfc) read, and went to bed. What a great day!
Christopher
19 Nov
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