O Happy Day

I found a library here that has books in English! It’s not the world’s largest or most organized collection, but it’s enough to keep me busy for the next little while. It’s free and there is a certain amount of amusement to browsing through titles like “The Vampire Lestat” right next to Fodor’s Japan from 1982 right next to “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”.

Unfortunately the free Japanese lessons turned out to be a one-on-one disorganized jumble. It’s hard to describe – there were almost as many teachers as students, but while they had all these teaching aids, it’s as if there was no lesson plan. No coherent flow to the class to make sense to the student and my teacher would break off into mumbling to herself rather often. Somehow you were expected to know the difference between that mumble and the mumble that is a Japanese sentence that you were supposed to repeat. Difficult when what you’re trying to learn is Japanese. And last time I checked, 500yen was not free. Cheap, yes. But not free.

The museum of Japanese history was likewise a mixed bag. Some of the exhibits were incredibly interesting – like the portable 4’ reverse water wheel used to flood the rice paddies (you put human power in to pump water uphill). But there was no English guide of any kind, so if there weren’t pictures with a particular exhibit, you were sunk.

On the way back, I stopped in the tourism office to see if they had a map in English by any chance. The lady told me to wait, and rushed off to the back room. She came back some 5 minutes later, blowing the dust off a map that had words in our alphabet on it! I didn’t have to heart to tell her that it was in Spanish. And truthfully, “playa” and “museo” are a lot more useful than “squiggle” and “squiggle with a dot”.

Even the weather cooperated – I was cold tonight for the first time in 3 weeks (when I wasn’t at work). And the first set of care packages got here yesterday - Thank you! (The postman drives a moped with a bright red/orange padded container on the back – it looks almost exactly like a dominos delivery.)

All in all, a very good day for my 5th entire day off work since Easter. I might actually need to stop counting them individually now since my other hand is busy holding the world’s smallest violin.