Engrish, Two Years and A Special Occasion

Tomorrow, I am going to the airport with Marisa (CIR*) and Toda-san from K-town kyouikuinkai (Board of Education) to meet the new JETs. It will be nice to welcome Candice's and Brittany's replacements to Kochi, and it is a good opportunity for me to say hi to JETs that I haven't seen since Mid-year Conference back in January.

This means I have been in Japan for two years. Sugoi!

*Coordinator for International Relations - what Laurel used to do here.

Sunday was Mika's and my first wedding anniversary. :)

We went to K-city after church and booked into our hotel. After just chilling for a bit, we went out for a wonderful Italian dinner, complete with a bottle of wine.

Out on the town

After dinner, we walked down to the station and took a taxi to Aeon. We saw Inception at the movies. Good movie. See it if you get the chance.

Have I ever mentioned that Japan is big on bicycles? There is a two-storey storage area tacked onto the end of Kochi train station that houses hundreds of bikes.

Bicycles, bicycles, bicycles

Back to the hotel well after midnight, as we decided to walk from the mall and the movie had finished just before twelve.

After checking out on Monday, we spent a good deal of the day at Aeon mall, shopping and looking around, while waiting for my doctor's appointment. I had my ingrown toenail assessed and another appointment made for September.

Well, aside from such excitement over the weekend, there are a couple more things I want to mention in this blog post.

Firstly, I've talked about the fireworks displays here before. I had no idea, though, that the launching equipment was so industrially... huge.

The Susaki hanabi is on the 7th of August

We are looking forward to both the Nakamura fireworks display and the Tosa-Shimizu one, which is supposed to be magnificent. There will also be the usual fireworks at the end of the Ayu festival.

Now is a good time to go swimming in the river.

Swimming in Shimantogawa

Lastly, I wanted to put up a few Engrish pictures. I don't have my whole collection, but these range from a poster in a shopping complex near where we had MYC in January, to a sign on the door of the bathroom in our hotel room just this last Sunday.

Engrish in Kochi

In the last picture, it says "Sound the alarm for steam." The Japanese roughly translates as "The alarm will sound because of steam." I understand the thinking behind this. They translated "the alarm will sound" as "sound (of) the alarm" or "sound, the alarm"; and "because of steam" as "for steam" - ie. the reason being steam. It just goes to show how differently we think. No wonder I struggle so much with Japanese. :/

Peace.

Timotheos