Was waiting about 3 hours tonight for a DHL package to arrive. I ordered some shoes these week from Sweden (the only place where they had the pair I was after), and they were meant to be arriving via DHL. When the package arrived it wasn't my shoes, but a book from me mum. Dunno why she decided to send it by DHL rather than normal post though - got to be more expensive. So, thanks very much for the book ma, but hurry up and arrive, new sneakers!
Archive for January, 2008 Page 2 of 4
I watched this last night. Bloody brilliant. Definitely the best film I have seen for a long time.
Japanese kids are frequently taught English as if it were a call and response exercise. For example, they are taught that when someone asks "How are you?", they should answer "Fine thank you, and you?". This is the most notorious example of this, although it extends into various facets of English, and indeed all, education. It gets to the point that when there is one of the frequent influenza outbreaks at school, you ask the students how they are during the greetings at the beginning of the lesson and a whole synchronized chorus of coughing, hoarse, spluttering students will all croak back, "Fine thank you, and you?".
This isn't because the students don't know any other answers. If you grill them and stress that you want their true feelings, they will answer with a myriad of original (odd and occasionally perplexing) reponses: "I am beauty", or "I'm glad to be here tonight", or "Yes, I am", or even "I am happiness". I meet all with expressions of praise: "Well done", "Good, beauty itself withers in your presence, Taro", and "I'm glad you're here too", and so on. However, the next class when we do greetings, "I'm fine thank you, and you?". Pointless.
I was talking to one of my students yesterday. She had gone to America over the Christmas holidays with her family and was telling me about it. She got ill at some point during the trip, and they took her to the local hospital. As she was the only English speaker, her family made her talk to the doctor. She said she wasn't worried about it, as she wasn't that ill and we had recently done getting ill role-plays in class. Apparently, she was all ready to tell the doctor that "her belly ached". When the doctor came into the room though, she greeted the student's family and then turned to the girl and said, "So, how are you?". She, of course, replied, "I'm fine thank you, and you?". The doctor said, "If you are fine, why are you in the hospital?", (which I have to admit sounds little bit harsh). The girl got confused and nervously, started spouting Japanese until the hospital got an interpreter. I asked the girl to explain this to the class, as an example of why the students should always think about their responses to these simple questions. The kids were mesmerized by her story, with lots of "oooo"s and "ahhh, naruhoudo"s. I was happy that they could finally understand what we had been telling them for so long.
I went into the class today and started the lesson. "Good morning class, how are you?". The class, depleted by the current school infection and lead by the girl I had talked to, replied as one: "Fine thank you, and you?".
Magnum photos have an exhibition on their website at the moment, with one documentary photo per year from the last 60 years, to celebrate their 60th anniversary. I especially like this shot, of Russian villagers collecting scrap metal from space junk. Crazy.
Today is Coming-Of-Age Day (Seijin No Hi) in Japan, where all those kids who are currently 20 officially come of age. As it's a public holiday here today, and because there are 3 universities near here, there have been loads of perfectly-manicured young girls walking around in their coming-of-age kimonos, getting drunk on the free-samples of beer they are finally allowed to drink, and clutching their free samples of tobacco and condoms. A wonderful, wonderful day. Too much oogling to take any photos.
I wonder if it's because I am getting too old to understand the instructions that these youngsters are putting on all the internet sites, or if it's because they are all concerning PCs and I am used to Macs, but trying to play emulators on my PSP is really, really confusing me.
Edit: Holy Fucking Shit! I got it working! I'm playing Mario on my PSP! Emulators FTW!!!111
Horrible weather today; cold, windy and lots of chubby rain. Instead of going to some temple as me and the Eri had planned, we decided to go to the Hokusai exhibition at the Edo Tokyo Museum. The exhibition centres on the relationship between the famous painter (probably responsible for the modern Japanese fetish of tentacle sex) and the German physician, Philipp Franz von Siebold, who was the resident doctor on the Dutch colony on the artificial island of Deshima, off the coast of Nagasaki, at the time, the only place where foreigners were allowed in Japan, during its closed-country period. Though the story of how their relationship seems rather unclear, von Siebold came into possession of some of Hokusai's paintings, which formed the basis of the exhibition, although many of Hokusai's most famous paintings were also included, like The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, and Red Fuji, both from his series of the 36 Views of Mount Fuji. The thing that was most interesting for me about these, and indeed all the most famous of his paintings, was how small they were. Having seen massive enlargements of thee paintings as posters in Athena and on TV, and having seen so many western paintings in galleries, I was expecting these to be of a similar size. It was a little strange to find out that both are really quite tiny, less than an A4 sheet of paper. The fact that they are so small makes the level of detail all the more impressive. One thing that did somewhat ruin some of them was that the ones that were owned by the national museum in France had massive "Owned By The National Museum of France" stamps all over them. What kind of idiot would put a bloody massive red stamp in the middle of a masterpiece? A mustachioed, beret-wearing, onion-selling one apparently. There were a lot of other really beautiful paintings that were less famous but no less impressive. I particularly liked the painting of Ama, (female divers), which looks like something from a nightmare, and Eri was a big fan of his 53 Stations of Tokaido, as there was (a little unbelievably) a Famicon (NES) game of it that she played as a kid - I think that that's probably the best reason I've ever heard for the appreciation of the works of a great master!
