06 10 2004
I turned 22 yesterday. Being many miles away from friends and family
back home, I expected it would pass by pretty quietly. But everyone
here's been so kind.
I woke up early, because it's started to get cold in the early hours
of the morning and I wasn't using a a top-sheet. After whiling away
some time, I headed into work. Tuesdays are my longest day by an hour
or two - a total of 9 hours including a lunch break. But it generally
goes quickly unless I haven't had enough sleep, and before long it was
time to knock off.
A week ago I'd dropped into BT's bar. It's a "gaijin bar", which means
it's popular with foreigners and people who want to meet foreigners.
This makes it not the best place to go to practice Japanese, though
there are people who come who can't speak any English, too. But the
bar's got a nice atmosphere - good music playing in the background, but
not so loud you have to yell over it. Comfortable chairs. I'm also
friends with most of the people who work behind the bar. It's nice to
be able to drop by and know there'll always be someone to chat to.
There's a girl who works at the bar - let's call her J - who I first
met a couple of days after arriving in Kumamoto. Her friend was having
a birthday party at a yakitori and via BT I got to come along.
With recent study, my listening skills are slowly getting better, but
my speaking ability is still very low - it takes me a long time to
think about how to word a non-trivial sentence (if I can even think of
how to say it!), and I'm really shy about using my Japanese in a group
situation unless it's something I know I can say quickly.
When I dropped by the bar last week, J was working. Her English is
mainly isolated vocabulary and a few phrases, so when we chat it's in
Japanese. Chatting one on one with her was fun, because it was a lot
easier than it was a few months ago. Learning a new language is such a
mammoth task that it can feel like you're not making any progress.
But little retrospective revelations can be rewarding.
Anyway, while chatting with J, I'd mentioned my upcoming birthday. She
asked if I'd made any plans yet, and on hearing no, she suggested we
go to Kimura-san's - the friendly yakitori guy from that first
birthday party. I hadn't really thought to organise something for my
birthday, so I agreed that sounded good.
Back to yesterday. After work finished, one of my coworkers pulled out
a card and present, and presented it to me. The card had been signed by
the whole office, and the present was a nice tie. I'd mentioned in passing
that I like understated patterns months ago after I'd bought myself
some new ties, and my coworker had remembered. It was really nice of
my coworkers to go to the trouble - I didn't expect anything.
After wrapping up at work, OT and I headed to the restaurant with one
of our students who'd taken the final lesson for that day. When we got
there, we met J and J's friend who'd had the birthday when I first got
here. More than 7 months ago, now.
We sat down at a table and chatted away while waiting for more people
to show up. By about 10pm things got started. We ate a bunch of dishes
like a really delicious Cesar salad, something that looked like
lasagna but which was actually made out of tofu, and various other
things.
After dinner, the lights dimmed, and one of the restaurant staff come
out bearing a slightly wonky but very exotic looking cake. We were all
surprised when we found out J and another girl who was there had toiled
over it for quite some time after work. It was a banana sponge cake
with chunks of banana in it, topped in icing and mushrooms - the
mushrooms made from chocolate sticks and chocolate drops.
Everyone launched into a chorus of "happy birthday", which was
interrupted near the end in favour of another rendition with the aid
of a karaoke machine - there were 2 TVs around the bar and portable
mics and song selection devices lying around. After a very Japanese
version of the "happy birthday" song, we tried the cake.
The cake, despite its slightly non-standard geometry, was actually
really tasty, a fact that its makers were equally content to revel in.
The rest of us laughed along as the cake making pair echoed back a
dialog like:
"umai!"