I should have mentioned this before, because it may color your impression of me and therefore, perhaps, my blog: I`m talking to myself as I walk down the street. A lot, really.
I am kind of trying to keep quiet about it, you know, I`m not shuffling along cursing everyone I meet or, you know, nobody. It`s really nothing like that. But my lips are definitely moving and if you stood right up to me which, of course, nobody is ever going to do even to a native whose lips are moving, much less a foreigner; if you did though, you could hear that I was saying things.
I have two unrelated but decidedly complementary reasons for doing this. One is, I don`t know if I`ve mentioned this less than forty times before, I`m pretty lonely here. I never know what has gone only into my journal and what has gone on here and my time is too limited to reread my own blog so forgive me, but I`m lonely the way I haven`t been for a long time, since college, because I am used to chatting with people and Japanese people aren`t always the chatty type, one, and not with me anyway, two.
So that`s one reason -- I`m not talking with anyone at all and my mouth is trying to chat so that`s part of it. The other part is that in its drive to deal with its surrounding the part of my brain that is trying to read all the time is trying to read Japanese and being only partly successful. Because while I know most of the kana I know only a small percentage of the Kanji, so anyway my brain is trying to sound out or figure out what I do know on every sign I see, which, I can tell you, in Kyoto gives me a lot to do.
So, yeah, talking to myself. Go figure. Quietly though.
The Japan Diet
I bought a pair of pants the other day -- it wasn`t a fashion thing; it`s just that even my belt couldn`t keep the old ones up any more. It`s what I call the Japan diet, which is not so much exactly a diet as a combination of walking, as I may have mentioned before, 15-20 miles a day, with eating, as I may have mentioned before, about one meal plus a couple of little snacks a day. Three gallons of tea I don`t think figures into this whole equation anywhere. So I was walking along eventually with one hand in my pants pocket, whose sole function was to hold my pants up. If you`re walking along talking to yourself it does you no good to also be holding your pants up by grabbing your belt.
Should I take off my . . . ?
So I bought a pair of pants when I was visiting my friends in Tokyo. I have to say I didn`t have any trouble remembering the word for pants.
When I was learning Japanese early on, we had a chapter on family, you know, and colors, and all kinds of things. And of course we had one on types of clothing. (As an aside I`ll tell you that the verb for "to wear" differs for what you`re wearing, depending in part on whether it`s above or below the waist.) But of course, since they all came in the same chapter, I had trouble in a couple cases remember which was which. This was not uncommon, of course -- the words for yellow, ("kiiro") and black ("kuro") took me a little while to remember.
Anyway, the two I kind of couldn`t remember of kinds of clothing were pants ("zubon") and shoes ("kutsu"). I think it was the zu/su sound, that gave me the problem.
So the first time I went into a Buddhist temple area I wanted to ask if I should take off my shoes. No, I didn`t, you know . . .. But at that moment I formed a very clear sense in my mind as to which was pants and which was shoes.
Oh, and by the way, the salesman who sold me the pants bowed to me when he sold them and kept bowing to me when he was following me out of the store, and in fact followed me all the way out onto the sidewalk bowing the whole way. These were DEEP BOWS. Oh my. I can`t imagine what a suit calls for.
Tea
One day real soon I`m going to shut up about tea. But it`s not going to be today.
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| This was a lot of it. |
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| My sensei |
So, dewa mata ne, I`ll see you I hope on Wednesday.
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