I got a cold (and then I got better)

Isn't my life just riveting?

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I've been a rambling maniac trying to keep up with this week. I mean holy hell!

My first bit of language exchange is done and done, and in my humble opinion it's been going really well. I have actually had my first ever real live conversation in exclusively Japanese. Of course, it was terrible terrible grammatically nonsenseical pointy-grunty Japanese, but we did manage to understand each other (a little).

Language exchange: Useful and occasionally delicious.

See, the point is that the school set me up with a bunchload of different people, and then, reminiscent of speed dating (I can imagine, speaking not out of personal experience or anything wink wink nudge nudge), we decide if and when we want to meet again. Of course, I'm not really looking for anything serious at the moment since long distance relationships are such a pain, but I'm all up for a good spring fling.

There is indeed a piece of cake inside
this crêpe.

I'm not really by nature a social person. Certain people who might read this may have experienced having to more or less literally drag me out of my apartment to just get my ass to a godamn party already. But this week? I've been actively initiating contact with people I don't know.

And it has not been totally terrible.

This is a real character development for me. I have gained many experience points in Human.

The fun bit is that since these were all kinds of people, every meetup has been totally different. The first one involved crêpes and karaoke with a couple of university students. The second was beer and yakitori at a tiny streetside foodstall (yattai; a Fukuoka special tradition) with a buisnessman. Then, dinner with an incredibly polite and quiet little lady who spoke almost no english at all. Also, totally went to a cat café.

This cat doesn't love me. This cat only loves chicken.

Yattai are adorable. This is out on the street. They show up from Japanese Narnia around
sunset to serve delicious (albeit slightly expensive) food. And beer.

Gratinated chili tofu is ridiculous.
Ridiculously awsome.

The world is my classroom and it is full of beer.

I would actually like to take a minute to recomend this type of exchange to anyone learning any language. No really. Sitting in school memorizing grammatical constructs is all well and good, but actually using it on people is a whole other world. A terrible, scary world wherein you feel as stupid as a particularly dim child, where all your ideas and thoughts are worth as little as the pitifully small number of words in your vocabulary. The best phrase to learn is "There is something I would like to say, but I do not have the skill". It sucks, and yet it is also undeniably awsome.

It gives you the confidence to fuck up. It gives you practise in pulling words out of your ass without a dictionary, and shows you just how much you need to work on something before you're able to use it in the field. If you're like me and enjoy feeling at least marginally more intelligent than a door handle, being a total bumbling lingual idiot is gonna take some getting used to, and the only way to do that is to, well, do it. Exposure, I think, is the word I'm looking for. As they said on GPod, "languages aren't learned, they're acquired".

I am going to continue this in Tokyo if I can, and even when I go back to Norway. So I don't lose what I'm working for here to the limitations of my frankly terrible long term memory.

Learning Japanese the fun way: "This one means alcohol, right, and that one... different kind of alcohol, yeah? Oooh, I spy with my little eye something that means beer."

"But Han-Silly, what about the cold you got?", none of you asked.

Well, all this has been fun and good, but it has also been totally exhausting. And of course me being me, I just had to go and ask to be moved up a class in school. This same week. You know, just to see if I can do it. The school said yes, gave me a metric butt-ton of homework and sent me on my merry way. So to catch up with that class I've been doing about a months worth of learning as well as these language exchange thingies on top of my own regular schoolwork.

Suffice to say I've been stretching myself a little thin latelly... And of course it couldn't last.

After three hours of belting out Karaoke classics (sober!) on Wednesday I woke up with a painful throat and runny nose on Thursday. The following night was butt-tastically cold, and on Friday I was running a low fever. Seriously, these Japanese houses. I love my room to death, but it is made of 50% aircondition and drafts. I of course went to school anyway, because I was raised in a household where, if you had any limbs still attached, unless your liver had exploded and your head fallen off, you would go to school. No mercy for a minor head-cold.

But after school I was feeling like David Beckham's high school gym socks and my nose was dripping like a bad analogy. It was time to go home and stay there. Went by the conbini to get some provisions, and since this was a problem much too serious for one nikuman to handle,

I bought two. Also got myself the best cold medicine available anywhere in the world,

a 30NOK bottle of bad whisky from 7/11. As a good man once said, "When you have a cold, alcohol won't do a thing to help, but it will make being sick a whole lot funnier". And it totally worked!