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?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Post a Comment