Watching the Grass Grow

It is very frustrating to me how my Japanese ability fluctuates so dramatically. Last week I was feeling crappy because I couldn't manage to get a good, grammatically correct, normal sounding sentence out in Japanese. And it took me forever to understand everyone too. But this weekend, it suddenly clicked in, and for two whole days I was amazingly fluent. It was the most wonderful thing!
Here's how it happened, I think:

On Saturday I spent from noon until midnight with my frisbee team. We played frisbee, talked about playing frisbee, went to the public baths, and then to a nomikai (drinking party) to celebrate the end of the summer/beginning of the new semester. So I guess I was pretty much saturated with Japanese all day long. The alcohol at the end of the day was also a big help. Not that I'm pushing drinking, but if you are feeling like your foreign language speaking skills could use some help, have a few beers and start talking. I find that I improve by at least 200% when intoxicated. It also helps if your partners are also drinking; it makes them less afraid to talk to the crazy foreigner. But anyway, I was seriously complimented several times on the improvement in my Japanese by some of the more serious guys on the frisbee team. I trust their judgement, and I am glad for the encouragement.

Sunday was also a day spent with lots of Japanese students, but I think I actually ended up talking more English. I went to a "Sports Day" hosted by DESA, the "let's get to know foreigners" club at Doshisha University. There were quite a few Japanese students there, but there were an equal number of Americans, Russians, Brits, and a few others mingling around. I met a group of students from Principia College, a small Christian Science college just outside of St. Louis, who are in Japan for only two months, but they are traveling around to lots of places. In addition, I made a few more contacts for firsbee players in the area looking to set up pick up games, which was nice. But anyway, most of these people spoke little or no Japanese. But that became very little of a problem when yours truly was nominated to be the translator for the day. Yippee. I don't know how it happened, but it was nice practice. And after the sports fun, that is, after my team lost and was consequently assigned to clean-up duty, we went over to the river for a nice barbeque.

Japanese barbeques are much smaller and yet much bigger than American ones. That is, the grill is tiny. It's about the size of those portable ones you can buy at Walmart for $3. But instead of cooking large slabs of meat (which wouldn't fit anyway) they chop up lots of veggies, thin slices of meat, fish, and chicken, and throw it all on together. When it is done, you take your chopsticks over and pick out what you want. It's a very social event.

Speaking of the BBQ, apparently, the day before some kid had burned his face on fireworks or a grill or something only meters away from where we were set up. There must have been nothing else exciting going on in the news other than this story, because there was TV film crew wandering around for two hours taking shots of people eating and setting off fireworks. And then they worked for at least a half an hour on how best to capture that two by two meter square where he was burned. Seriously, that camera was pointed at that spot of grass for at tens of minutes at a time. Different angles, different lighting, from the river, from the hill, from directly in front...I'm sure that grass has never been more famous.

And now that I have entirely digressed, I shall go to dinner.