Persimmons are hung in rows to dry, for later to be enjoyed as a C vitamin rich snack.
A natural ailment for sore throat. 'Karin' pickled in honey. My Ikebana teacher surplied the fruit. The honey was bought at Kokoroya, an NGO helping mentally challenged people and local farmers, while promoting chemical free produce.
'Bunka no hi' is the National culture day in Japan and therefore a tea ceremony was arranged in one of the local parks.
A good friend and her mother invited me(b) to join, and that is an invitation I would never turn down. The atmosphere alone is reason enough to join, the air tingling with respect, humbleness and discipline. The joy of being surrounded by beautiful kimono clad ladies is another good reason for signing up. The excellent tea a third. Tea ceremony is almost like a group meditation where the World is no bigger than the tea ceremony room and everyone's attention is on the art of making and enjoying the tea.
I got the chance to participate in two different kinds of tea ceremonies. One was Iemotosenke, the other omotesenke.
The women on the far left is my friend's mother.
As expatriates in Japan the question we seem to get most often is "Are you speaking Japanese?"
Our answer continue to be the same, that we are trying to learn it, - hoping someday to make it to 2-kyu, but doubting that it will ever happen.
One's level of Japanese is measured in kyu's were 1-kyu means you are 100% fluent speaking and 4-kyu means you are on a very basic level.
We are somehow in between 3-kyu and 4-kyu. We would fail a 3-kyu due to the grammar, but our vocab would be sufficient to pass through though...we think...
These days studying has become a challenge as our classes continuously are canceled due to Henrik's busy work schedule. Self discipline is not really our strong side, when there are tons of (other) fun things awaiting outside the door. And there are ALWAYS tons of fun things awaiting outside the door.
But there is still hope. Few weeks ago, a good Japanese friend introduced us to a language community on the web, iknow.co.jp. Its originally made for Japanese learning English (Generally Japanese people are very interested in learning English) but recently the site also offers the opposite,- that English speaking persons can study Japanese.
Basically the site offers simple intelligent built up courses that extend your vocab through useful phrases. Its very flexible and an algorithm makes sure you learn what you need to learn.
The real strength of the site though is the community and the tools supplied to support it. Journal and shoot boxes for example make it possible to communicate with each other and this is very much done here. It's a buzzing community. B's first journal written in Japanese resulted promptly in five comments from Japanese users. Besides being encouraging it also opens up for opportunities to practice your skills with native speaking Japanese.
Big Brother is also incoporated in the community. You can easily see how many words and how many minutes any user has studied at a given date...and they can see your effort as well. This works very much as a whip to study as often at possible.
All-in-all a great site we hope (and these days believe) will keep us on track for a while.
