ury bath tub) at the top of the hill across the street from school. For about two months, from about mid-June to mid-August, the place has a "beer garden." Some beer garden.The beer garden was set up in the parking lot. There was certainly plenty of beer to go around, but none of it was German (or Austrian!). And there were no decorations to speak of, there was no tent, there were no benches to sit on (just chairs), and there was no oom-pah-pah music. And a lot of the fare was typical Japanese food, such as yakisoba, takoyaki, and grilled squid. And they even had an "Italian" salad on the menu. At least I saw some sausages, but they were really small! Like I said, some beer garden.
Last Saturday, July 5, I attended another party, a yukata party. Naturally, most people in attendance wore a yukata, which is a light-weight summer kimono. Luckily, you don't have to own a yukata to attend such a party, since you are able to borrow one on the premises. And if you don't know how to put it on, there is someone on hand to help you out. What a deal! (Putting the yukata on is the easy part. It's tying the obi that is complicated!)
Since the party was right around tanabata, which falls every year on July 7*, I also got to write a wish on paper and hang it from a piece of bamboo, since that's what the Japanese do for tanabata. The funny thing about that is that since I'm a rookie in these parts, I had no idea what the significance of the "wish-tied-to-bamboo" thing was until a couple of days after the party when I heard people talking about tanabata.
*The Japanese like these "double dates": 3/3 is Girl's Day and 5/5 is Children's Day, for example.
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For whatever reason (could it be the heat?) I had a rough time sleeping on Tuesday night. So around 1 a.m., I went to the kitchen to grab a snack in hopes that eating something would help me fall asleep. And guess who I saw crawling around the kitchen floor? Yup, ol' Mr. Cockroach. I guess he decided to
skip the motel and stick to sightseeing. Well, luckily, I was able to trap him and dispose of him."Dispose of him? What do you mean, Yama-san?"
"Well, I took him outside and let him fly away."
"Fly away? Why didn't you kill him, Yama-san?"
"Well, one of my neighbors told me he found a cockroach in his apartment a couple of weeks ago. He said he just picked it up with a piece of tissue paper and sent it on it's way. He said, 'Cockroaches aren't dangerous. Why should you kill them?' He practically laughed at me when I said I would have killed it. So I guess the Japanese are more used to dealing with cockroaches than I am. So I tried to adopt my neighbor's attitude."
"Geez, Yama-san, what's gotten into you?"
"I don't know, man. I don't know. I must be turning Japanese."
By the way, the cockroach flew away from my apartment when I let him go, just down the street. He must be one smart cockroach, if there is such a thing. Before I let him go, I told him he won't be so lucky next time!
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Now that I've been trying hard to learn kanji for a couple months, reading Japanese is slowly getting easier for me. I just picked up a book in the library about recycling or something like that, for instance, and sort of got the gist of the couple sentences I read. And yesterday, I picked up a novel and was also able to understand roughly what was going on. So there's hope that I'll learn this language eventually. But consider this: I probably need to know about 2000 kanji to be able to read and understand most books, newspapers, magazines, and documents, for instance. Right now, I "only" know about 600. So I have a long way to go! (By the way: Check out number 100. That's the kanji for mountain, which is yama in Japanese. So that's my personal kanji.)
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