Today was a fairly easy day at school – only three classes, and one of them involved watching a scene from the movie Superman with the students and helping them with their listening skills. The other two classes were preparing for the upcoming interview tests. Like I said, an easy day.
At school I had a nice chat with Ms. Miyake. She is going to help me find some books in Japanese in my reading level – which is probably sixth grade elementary school. She said she’d see what she could come up with, and she said her neighbors might have some, too. Nice to see everyone chipping in for the foreigner – we’ll see what happens.
My hair has been raging out of control – and with the sweaty weather lately it’s been a real pain. Today on the way home from school I stopped at the barber and got a nice short haircut. The place was empty, and I tried out my Japanese with the barber that was cutting my hair. I did surprisingly bad, actually. There were lots of times when he couldn’t understand what I was saying – that might have been because I was trying out lots of new vocabulary words on him. Luckily the quality of the haircut didn’t reflect my poor communicative ability.
I went next door for some cheap yakisoba noodles for dinner, and then took the train the rest of the way home. Since I had dinner out of the way, I was able to study for a little while at home memorizing even more vocabulary to perplex Japanese people. I spent almost an hour on the phone with Antoine, who is trying to arrange his re-entry permit back into the country before his flight to America in August. We chatted about all kinds of crazy things, and it was good to catch up with him.
Around 8:30 I called Kuniko, and she was on the train platform waiting for her ride home. She called me back when she got to her apartment – around 9:00. We talked for almost an hour, and it was a really good conversation. We did the first ten minutes or so in Japanese, and that actually went pretty well. It’s nice to be able to do some of the heavy work in our conversation, instead of leaving it all on poor Kuniko.
We’re hoping to spend some time together this weekend. She’ll be in Kakogawa and we’re both hoping to see the new Harry Potter movie that is out this weekend.
