先生の家

Today, I visited one of my teachers from last semester who I've been in somewhat constant contact with. He invited me to lunch a few weeks back, and I kind of invited myself up to his house. He said it was fine, and we decided on a day, which was today.

It takes him (who was sick today, hence the mask) about ten minutes to get to school by scooter; it took me about an hour to get to his house by bike. Needless to say, there're some slopes involved. It was difficult, and I barely managed it, but I was able to bike the entire way up and even farther than I had to go by quite a ways. He lives up in a suburb about eight kilometers (5.7 miles) away from where I live, and while the elevation gain is only about 200m (~650 feet) it feels a lot more significant on a bike.

He met me at a traffic circle - the first I've ever actually seen - which I went to kind of on a hunch, and it ended up being right next to his house. This picture is a 360-degree panorama taken from nearly the middle of the traffic circle. Guess where the sun is.

I met for the first time both his children (two of 'em) and his wife (one of those!) and both seemed very pleasant to say the least. My teacher is well into his fifties, and from the time frames they mentioned while we were talking, his wife (who is Canadian, and appeared to be of Northern European ancestry, maybe so far as Irish, but I didn't ask) must be getting near that mark as well, but she must be benefiting from the Japanese lifestyle or something, because she could very well be in her early thirties judging by her appearance.

Oh, and they had cheese. Real, honest to cheese, cheese. White cheddar, yum, yum. You have no idea how long it's been since I had cheesy cheesy cheese. Cheese. ... Apparently, they had gone to Costco (there's one in Osaka somewhere) the previous day with some friends, and had just gotten back, as they gave me about a half a pound of cheese to me and a further half pound to deliver to some friends. Yum. Cheese.

We went for a walk and ran into some kids who were walking a dog. When they saw me, they started talking about me a little, and eventually, one of them said to another "Hey, say something in English!" I turned around and interjected "Japanese is okay, too." I love getting people with that one. They had a cute little dog, as well. Isn't he (?) cute?

We visited a bird sanctuary near where he lives as well as a couple of parks, then came back to his house for a bit and talked for another hour or so, then I headed home. The ride home didn't take nearly as long, since the whole thing was downhill and I don't need a map to simply go down a hill.

[These random plants are blurry because I have my camera set to use a shutter speed of 1/60 when the flash is on, and I didn't think to compensate for the fact that I had the lens zoomed at 200mm on top of the 1.5x magnification from my APS-C sensor. That gives an effective 300mm of focal length, and while my lens is rated for a nominal three stops (1/60>1/120>1/240>1/480) the flash didn't take in enough light to overpower the ambient, hence the blur.]

With just a few days left in Japan, I'll be selling my bike tomorrow. I've used it pretty hard, so it looks older than it is, but used bikes don't fetch much anyway. I'd be getting a pretty good deal if I got $30 for it. The other one (the first new bike I bought in Japan) is too beat up to fetch me more than $10 if I'm lucky, but one of my friends is going to fix it up and use it, since it has gears and she has a tire patching kit.

[Edit: We also saw this car while we were walking around. You can see on the front it's a GT-R, but we saw a couple of other really nice cars while wandering around.
On the way back, I saw an import car shop and saw for the first time in nearly a year a car with the steering wheel on the right (which is to say, "left") side.]

[Another edit: I asked my teacher later if it was alright for me to put this up later, and I like it, so here it is. My teacher and his wife, at right.]

Ko-Un

I woke up at a decent time today, for the first time in a week. Not such a big deal on its own, but I came with some good ideas for RPG stuff and read some interesting stuff from the GM guide.

When I went to school to meet with one of my teachers, she wasn't there, but I met up with another teacher, who took Kilk and I out to lunch for yakiniku (fried meat). When I got back, the teacher I was supposed to meet was there (she was coming in for work, so I was just supposed to meet her at some point after 1PM) and we talked for about three hours while she let me pick all the books I could carry from her bookshelf to take home with me. She also gave me a brand new electronic dictionary. It just happens to be one with a special feature that I will make great use of in the next year or so, as a random bonus.

Now, I just need to ship them home...

A Yabari Moment

We were talking about shamisen today in class. A shamisen (三味線 "three flavor strings") is kind of like the Japanese version of a banjo, though the way that they're played is very different. To begin with, or at least, to begin with my very limited knowledge of the subject, banjos tend to strummed while shamisen tend to be plucked. I don't think I've seen or heard one strummed. In any case, the sounding chamber - the body - is made from a frame of some kind of wood, and then covered with the skin of a cat or a dog, whichever you happen to have handy.

Now, I don't know how I made this mistake, but I thought that the teacher had said that the strings of the shamisen were made from the skin of a cat, which would be... wrong. I said as much, and class went on. It was just a small Yabari moment.

元気先生: Do you know what part of a cat is used in the construction of a shamisen?
Me: The... stomach? (腸 "intestines" was a word I didn't know until later.)
元気先生: Er... The skin. You know... [strumming motion] right?

[I'm not certain how I construed this to mean that the strings (specifically the strings) were made from the skin of a cat, but that's the idea I got.]

Me: I, er, don't think that's right, but...
元気先生: I think it is.
Me, to Valentina: He's wrong.
Valentina, to me: He's Japanese, I think you're wrong.

This somehow upset me - more than it should have - and I started furiously researching.
Or at least, as furiously as possible with a pocket Japanese-English dictionary. I researched, in any case. As I said earlier, it turns out that the skin of a cat (or a dog!) is used for the sounding chamber, and that the strings are not only not made from the intestines of a cat, but "catgut" refers to a string made from anything except cat. I was exactly wrong. Ouch.

Oh, and to top it off, shamisen strings in particular are traditionally made from silk, unlike Western stringed instruments, though both usually use nylon or other plastic strings now.

Anyway, we saved the rest of the discussion for the break, and I looked it up on Wikipedia and - ha! - was mostly able to translate it on the fly. As an example, I admit that I don't know the difference between a donkey and a mule is, or what either one is called in Japanese.

Today's class was fun, but a little embarrassing because I Yabari'd - though I'm very much a noob compared to the Yabari himself.

Unnamed Teacher

Somehow, I don't know the names of most of my teachers. Being able to simply call them sensei is really convenient, and I very rarely am in a situation where there are more one or two sensei around, so it's usually not a problem. It's a little awkward when I go to the teacher prep rooms, but not really a problem outside of that.Well, and when I want to say whose picture this is. So this is my teacher on Tuesday for my afternoon classes. She has a name, I think, but I really haven't ever used it, so I don't know what it is.