It was raining when I woke up. The cherry blossoms have surely met their demise now. A very appropriate April Fool’s Joke played by Japanese weather.
But it’s the first day of the Japanese fiscal year, meaning everyone’s going back to school soon. I have to do my placement test again tomorrow, like I did at the start of the year. Hopefully it won’t take 3 hours again like last time, with the internet being so slow between each loading page. Wow, how the time flies. Was that really six months ago? I must have been because I do feel like I’ve been here an age, and other times I feel like I’ve barely been here at all. I’m leaving in five months’ time. Time here feels so much shorter now that I’ve passed the halfway mark.
Because it’s the first day of the Japanese fiscal year and I’ve had the idea in my head for a couple of days now, I decided to start a new blog. I was originally going to start it for when I finished this one, but I figured now’s as good a time as any to start. It’s the Japanese counterpart for this blog, only politer of course (and I’m not sure my sass would translate very well into Japanese anyway). Also, I’ll only updating it twice a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays, I’ve decided. I think I’ll have a specific topic in mind for each day. It’s easier to think of things to say when it’s only a weekly or biweekly blog as opposed to a daily one like this one, and I especially struggle for words on days when I do nothing.
That’s a bit of a contradictory segue to the name of my blog, which is “Isogashii Igirisujin” (“Busy Brit” in English). The name was of my own creation (you can tell by the audacious alliteration), yet somehow I feel like I’ve stolen it from Rachel. She’s much busier than me (you should have seen her holiday schedule) and is more deserving of the “Isogashii Igirisujin” title than me. It sounds like the kind of blog she would write. I think she has a Japanese blog, actually. I just don’t know how often she updates it. But I AM busy so I guess I deserve it too. I may not have been on adventure today, but I was working, and I wrote up my new blogpost in Japanese, so I’ve at least been productive. Now that I have this job I’ve not been watching videos at all. I’ve been cramming all my available time into writing stuff up and reading news articles. So I guess it’s still somewhat killing time, but in a more academic way.
Anyway! Here’s my new blog.
https://isogashiiigirisujin.wordpress.com/
It’s in Japanese, though. I don’t know how many of my readers know Japanese. But just putting it out there. It’s my little side project to practise my Japanese skills and to also reach out to a Japanese audience who may be interested in a foreigner’s perspective of Japan. I’m also thinking that if I write two blog posts a week it would be something for my tutor to correct for me, and it would mean I’m regularly practising Japanese writing twice a week. I write in Japanese all the time anyway, but it’s rare for me to write so much in one go.
Today I gave a self-introduction and talked about how I went and saw some sakura yesterday. I keep calling it “omoigakenai ohanami” (“unexpected flower-viewing”). I love the word omoigakenai because it’s the same word they use for the Japanese translation of the first Hobbit movie. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey becomes Hobitto: Omoigakenai Bouken, with “bouken” of course meaning “adventure”.
“Isogashii Igirisujin” is a much prettier blog because it has a sidebar with a picture of me sitting in the sakura tree from yesterday, and it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Aaaah.
Not really much to say today! Goodnight.
naiveinnippon 