Daily Life 1: We're Japanized!



 My daily life eh?  Well the months of August and most of September are summer vacation for all school students here in Japan, including Doshisha University where Ben is studying.  Therefore, Ben is not in classes right now, so our mornings are pretty relaxed.  Almost everyday I go and practice at Americaya (musical instrument store) in the morning from 10 till 12, and after that, I always spend at least an hour at the store talking with the staff.  The practice rooms there have become so familiar to me, just like the ones at Uvic.  Recently I’ve been practicing with Satoshi, a violinist who works at the store. 


Looking into Americaya
    We just had a mini concert with some musicians connected with Americaya.  It was a lot of fun.  People played pop music, classical, blues, jazz etc, and it was at a live music house.  I played with 2 different violinists.  One song was a version of Eric Clapton’s Layla that I arranged with blues improvising (anybody who knows me knows that I rarely play anything other than classical, so this was quite new for me) and the other piece I played was an arrangement of Debussy’s Claire de Lune for violin and piano. 
    

Looking out of Americaya
Usually at Americaya I learn very useful phrases of Japanese and I have a notebook that I write everything down in.  2 of the staff can speak a bit of English, but compared to before, I can understand Japanese a lot better now, so they hardly speak to me in English anymore, which is ok.  If there’s ever something that they can’t communicate, we have an electronic dictionary in the store that we use all the time to look up words.  It works both ways, English to Japanese and Japanese to English. 
    


At my Japanese
study station
In the afternoon, I usually sit and do a whole bunch of Japanese flash cards with phrases that I’ve collected and vocabulary.  If we feel like it, Ben and I will go out and do something together.  Yesterday Ben took his placement test for which level of Japanese he’ll be in in October when classes start up again.  He said it went really well so we decided to go out and celebrate.  We went out and bought a camera actually, so maybe you’ll see some new photos soon.  My last camera was from 6 years ago and was too big to fit in anyone’s pocket.  After that we went to a movie and missed the last subway home which meant we had to take our first taxi ride in Japan to get home.  It was a pretty good day.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next>>>Daily Life 2: Japanese wedding clothes?


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Similar Post: Daily Life 5: Japanese Family over for Dinner


Completely Different Post: Updates 1: Make room for us Kyoto!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ben and Kailey lived in Japan not too long ago and also visit Kyoto every year.

Ben is developing a Japanese Practice site. It's current main functions are:
1. a Flash Card system that features a leveling system where you must answer correctly and "level up"to gain new cards, receive money and buy new decks - anime decks included!
2. Fill in the Blank system where you can choose to focus on particle practice or verb practice etc.
Japanese Practice Blog is here. Check out the Japanese Practice site here

No comments:

Post a Comment

Post a Comment