A long time ago I accepted an invitation to have lunch with the school office manager, Sato-san, at Hamawaki Junior High. She really likes English, and is a member of several Toastmaster clubs. She has a monthly English conversation group, and she invited me to be the guest of honor. I begged off the first time, but I finally got roped into going, and today was the big day. <\/p>\n
Kuniko had to teach two classes in the morning, and so I puttered around the house doing some laundry and straightening up, and then just about as soon as she got home I was out the door and headed to Koshien. <\/p>\n
Koshien is the area around the Hanshin Tigers ballpark near the outskirts of Osaka. It’s a nice part of town, actually, and I’ve liked what I’ve seen the few times that I’ve been there.<\/p>\n
Since I had a commuter pass the trip was largely free, and when I arrived I waited only a few minutes before one of the club members picked me up. She is a semi-retired doctor, and her English was pretty good. We took a bus together to “Rainbow Town” – a huge area of mansions painted in all the colors of the rainbow. The mansions were huge – very tall and there were so many that they blocked out a fair amount of the sky. <\/p>\n
The doctor said that when you ask people in Japan how many colors there are in a rainbow, they always say seven – no more, no less. I don’t know why that is, but it was an interesting piece of trivia. I’ll have to try it out. <\/p>\n
We got to Sato-san’s place, and everyone else was already there. The place was part of the Rainbow Town complex, and it had a really old feel to it – it reminded me of the teacher apartments that we recently lived in.<\/p>\n
We sat down and everyone introduced themselves, and then we just started talking and talking – just in English. The members of the club were quite intelligent, and I think they are pretty adept at using English. Besides the doctor and the office manager, there was a college English instructor, and a college science teacher who spoke not only English but also Japanese and her native Chinese. There was also a retired medical translator, who was the oldest of the bunch but perhaps had the best English. <\/p>\n
While we were talking we ate a lunch prepared by Sato-san. I had brought a bottle of wine, and we opened that and poured it around. I got the feeling like they didn’t normally have alcohol at these things, but everybody drank and everybody liked it. Maybe I should have brought another bottle.<\/p>\n
Although we talked about all kinds of things and it didn’t seem formal at all, right at 4:30 Sato-san said “Time’s Up!” and everybody started gathering their things and saying goodbye. It was a sudden end, but maybe those are the rules they use. We all went off to the train station by bus, and I shared a train back to Sannomiya with several of the members. We talked a lot more on the train, and by the time I got home I was pretty tired from talking so much.<\/p>\n
They invited me to join their monthly group, but I’m a little hesitant about doing it. It’s pretty far away, and giving up one afternoon a month seems like a lot. On the other hand, maybe it would help build connections for the future. They have lots of friends and lots of experience in Japan, and it could be a way to open some doors for me someday. Hmmm….<\/p>\n
Kuniko had dinner cooking when I got home, and she served up a delicious healthy dinner of mackeral with a dark savory sauce and some miso and noodle soup that was really delicious. I took a nice hot bath, and I slept like a baby – it was a budy day, but relaxing, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A long time ago I accepted an invitation to have lunch with the school office manager, Sato-san, at Hamawaki Junior High. She really likes English, and is a member of several Toastmaster clubs. She has a monthly English conversation group, and she invited me to be the guest of honor. I begged off the first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1135","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-ij","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}