Previous post
First post and explanation
Next post
Plus/Minus
On the plus side, the weather's turned warm and sunny all of a sudden.
On the minus side, that's a whole of two days we're going to get of not-misty-rain-and-chilly-winds.
On the plus side, only two weeks until I start to head home.
On the minus side, it says something about my plans to spend a year here after college that I'm so excited to come home after only two months. I've loved it here, but if I'm going to go for fluency in this language, I'm going to have to be better mentally prepared the next time I come to this country so I don't get so homesick.
On the plus side, mmmmm bread.
On the minus side, why does no one eat in public here? I want to just buy a candy bar and munch it down on the way home without feeling all rude and culturally insensitive. Or am I just imagining that the Japanese never eat in public? Then why'd that eight year-old come up to me in the train station babbling something about "nippon" and "gohan" that I couldn't understand while I was trying to load up on carbs for the hour-long bike ride home? Am I just being paranoid? Cuz if there was ever a country to make someone paranoid...
On the plus side, the convenience store workers recognize me now as That Crazy Gaijin Who Comes in And Buys Bread, Whiskey, or Beer and one of the workers said, "itsumo arigatou gozaimasu," to me with a big smile (translatable somewhere along the lines of, "thank you for shopping here all the time").
On the minus side, he then asked me a question I didn't understand and I just had to give him an embarrassed grin and say, "Sumimasen, shitsumon ga wakarimasen deshita." About ten seconds after I left the store, I realized that he'd been asking me, "Do you live around here?" in crazy super-polite Japanese (literally he asked me, "In this area is it being lived?" You can understand why I was a little confused). Curse you, keigo passive!
On the plus side, I've been exchanging lots of messages with my friends
On the minus side, now I miss you even moooore! EMO EMO EMO.
And finally, on the plus side I've been exchanging messages with a cool guy from Iceland over OkCupid and this quote from him made me giggle:
Though I can tell you that Iceland isn't all dreamlike with lots of eccentric people walking around reciting poetry and discussing introverted matters with the local elves.
And I don't have crazy sex orgies with my big-breasted blonde cheerleader girlfriend while chewing bubble gum and listening to gangsta rap in the back of my gas-guzzling gargantuan SUV parked next to the megachurch we just finished our evangelical youth group at.
Thus is international understanding promoted.