Yeah so… i rocked up to lecture today… walked in just as the “not-lecturer” said “Ok i’ll see you next week!”

An Actual photo of me at the time

After consulting my buddies they told me that the ACTUAL lecturer was sick and therefore lecture was cancelled.  I could’ve slept in! Oh well, more time to work on assignments I guess.

I went to dinner with a friend, JB, from my Japanese class last night.  Well… I wouldn’t call it dinner actually, I had Subway.. he had… nothing.  But what I’m getting at is we had a nice talk about Japan.  He lived in Japan for 2 years (and somehow managed to get into a Japanese 1 class??? He doesn’t know kanji apparently), and he lived around Osaka too.  He worked there, teaching english – must’ve been so cool!! In fact, he must’ve lived close to Hirakata as he used to catch a bus past Kansai Gaidai to get to work! He said it was a lovely campus and the people around the Osaka area are just great.

I asked him about Tokyo and he said Tokyo is to Japan like Sydney is to Australia – just bigger, cleaner and cooler because it’s in Japan.  Now to those who live outside Australia, Sydney seems like an awesome place… well.. you’re wrong in my opinion.  Sydney is a hole. However I DID grow up there, and for that reason there is something about Sydney that attracts me to it, but taking an objective, yet still slightly subjective look at Sydney: It has nothing going for it.  No culture.  Everyone’s busy, late, and angry and it’s quite a dirty city.  Sydney folk think it has culture, but that’s probably because they haven’t been to Melbourne.  They also think it IS relaxing, but that’s probably because they haven’t been to Brisbane.  JB said, in his opinion, Tokyo is something similar, not the same, but similar.  He said it’s big, there’s things to do, but in comparison to Osaka and other places in Japan it lacks the culture and friendliness due to the hustle and bustle of day to day life.

I don’t know how true all of this is, but overall he recommended it, however he said there are better things to do than Tokyo.  Makes me want to go to Tokyo even more now actually haha!

Well he was just telling me about Japan and i was firing a million questions and it was all so interesting.  He really enjoyed his stay there, and wants to go back again.  I told him to come and visit me while I’m in Japan We’re going to do an actual dinner this thursday with his Japanese girlfriend of 2 years, should be cool!

I have my very first Kanji test on thursday!! Yay! I’m kinda weird in the sense that I enjoy exams and tests, AND do well at them (usually).  So I feel confident as we are only being tested on 24 Kanji (our FIRST 24 Kanji!) and i studied some Japanese last year with Mitch in my spare time where I learned most of these Kanji anyway.  I just need to make sure I can write them correctly and remember the correct readings – I know what they mean when I look at them though.

I must say when I first started studying Kanji last year, I didn’t see the logic in them… which was EXTREMELY dumb of me i know! Because now i understand how handy they are.  Now that i’m studying Japanese and reading (simple) Japanese sentences, Kanji really speeds things up.  I kinda find it difficult to read a sentence if it’s straight hiragana/katakana (even though I’m very confident in those two syllabaries) , but kanji makes it a bazillion times easier.

This probably sounds majorly lame to the people that actually read this blog (Mitch, Steph, Heather, Teishou, Alec – i think) as all you guys are really good at Japanese already – and I envy you guys so much! However my Japanese Language journey has just begun!  And i’m finding it quite exciting!

Ciao for now!