pboos.ch

How time goes bye! It is just crazy. It still feels like I just got here. I am sorry that I forgot to post an update here for so long. I hope I can make up for that now. Even though I don’t even know where to start now! What should I tell you? There is so much! Well I will probably forget the most interesting stuff, but just ask for it and I will write about it.

Well I was asked what I normally do in the evening. That differs. Sometimes I just went home in the evening where I sometimes studied or watched TV in Japanese (no, I still don’t understand what they are saying there ). It is not that I could not do stuff with others. It is just that I want to be surrounded as much as possible with the Japanese language as possible. And if I do stuff with people from school I know it won’t be that much Japanese. Nothing against my friends from school. They are really cool people. After school I sometimes hang out for some time with a german and a swiss friend from school. We always have a lot of fun. But it is just german then.
Some evenings I go to activities from Church like tuesday and thursday. On tuesday the missionaries teach english speaking members Japanese. I guess I can’t get too many japanese lessons. On thursday we have Institute where we go through the book “the pearl of great price”. Yes, it is all in Japanese. But they are really nice and often translate for me.
Friday evenings we have an activity as well at church (they are hold every friday from what I was told). These with the single adults group. This week (friday) we had a FHE together and it was fun again. We played fruit basket (sorry, won’t go into explaining that game) and had different other get to “know each other” games. People are really friendly to me even though I don’t speak much Japanese. Lucky a lot of them have good english. Still I try to use my Japanese from time to time there. And I see the progress I am making already! I can tell them and ask them more than in the beginning. After the FHE I went with some newly met friends to eat something in Shibuya. Man that area is crazy! So many people! You won’t believe it! See the pictures below! Food was good and we went back home around midnight. The train was just packed! There wasn’t really any space left for more people. I wish I could have taken a picture. But there was not enough room to get my camera out!
Tomorrow evening I will go with Mie and some other people to do Karaoke. Ohh yeahh! That will be fun! I am excited!

Some words to the weather here. It is really humid! That makes it even more atsui (hot). We are as well getting into the raining season. It is not raining every day, but almost. I already think it is realy warm! And the real summer is not even here yet. How will I survive July? I don’t know…

About the cultural differences between Switzerland and Japan. Well. There are whole books written about that. I just read one that is called “polite fictions”. It talks about the difference between american and japanese culture. And yes. American culture is a lot closer to swiss culture than japanese culture. Some of the things I got confirmed from native japanese. Just one example: If you are talking for example about your wife or children. You tell the other person for example that your wife doesn’t look good, can’t really cook and that your children are stupid. This is their way of being polite to the other person and shows that you are humble. Otherwise you would be boasting. This might really confuse non japanese people.
I guess we will leave it to this example. Otherwise this post will get way too long! I should go to bed soon anyway!

Some words to the transportation. I get to love the transportation system here more and more. I bought a PASMO card which is really useful. You charge it with money and then use it to pay for your transportation. You just enter the station and walk through the gate where you touch the gate with you PASMO card. This will register that you entered the train line. It will as well show you how much money you have on your card. You then drive to the place where you want to go to and will have to go through another gate to exit that trainstation. There you do the same as when you enter and it will automatically charge you with the amount it costs. If you have a month pass for a area this will be considered also. It is really easy that way and you don’t need to bother about buying tickets. You just need to charge your card from time to time.

Today I checked out a garden in Shinjuku. It is really nice and as well big! Surrounded by all the tall buildings. To enter it costs 200yen. That seemed a lot to me. But then inside I really enjoyed it. It is really nice and clean. I can’t describe it so please just take a look on the pictures. There were a lot of people in the park. Especially a lot of children. I think those came with the kindergarden. Some people where drawing pictures and others where eating there lunch. It has a really good atmosphere there.

About my Japanese progress. I still feel like I don’t understand anything at all. But tonight I realised that I catch more things than my first few days here. It is not enough to understand people, but on the way to get there. I am still missing out on the vocabulary. I gotta find a way to improve in that area as quickly as possible.

Well I will leave it to this and hope that I will keep you up to date a little more often.

じゃ、またこんど (until next time)