Nihongo-a-Go-Go :: Children's Journal!

Typhoon!

Right now we're having a huge storm, called a typhoon. A typhoon is sort of like a hurricane, but it's not as strong. For us right now, it means that it is raining very hard the and the winds are blowing! When Mandy and I were walking home from the train station after work tonight, it was raining so hard that even our umbrellas didn't keep up very dry! And the rain seemed like someone was standing on the rooftops and throwing buckets of water down on us. The wind was blowing so hard that we were afraid that it would turn our umbrellas inside out!

Right now we're in training, which is where you go to learn how to do your job. It's a very long way away from where we live. We have to take a train to get there, and it takes about twenty minutes. Training is in a place called "Gifu" (Gee-fu). It's a small city. It has a lot of tiny streets and shops, and neat places to get food. It's a much smaller city than where we live. The people seem very very nice there. The people who are teaching us how to do our jobs though, they aren't very nice. But we're doing our best, and we will only be there one more day!

It's nighttime where I am now, but for you, your day is just starting. Isn't that weird?

A lot of things here are different. Mandy and I went grocery shopping a few days ago and didn't know what a lot of the things were! People eat a lot of different foods here. Like fish! They eat lots of other ocean animals, too. Like squids and octopus. They had big purple octopus tentacles at the supermarket!

It's very late here, so I'm going to go to bed soon! Good night!

Hanko!

Hello,

Today I went to learn about my new job. I had to fill out a lot of confusing papers so I could have a bank account to save my money. Japanese forms are very confusing! They are also very picky. When you are filling out a form to get something, you have to write your numbers a certain way (like you can't put lines through your zeros or a middle line through your sevens) and you need to make sure that you don't go out of the lines when you write your address. If you mess up, they'll make you do it again!

I did very well though, and I got it right on the first try.

I also got a "hanko" which is a stamp that I will use to sign my name. It is a round stamp that makes a mark about the size of a dime. It has my name is Japanese. You can see it below! It's hard to do it so tha it's perfectly straight and just where you think it will be! In the picture, my hanko rolled a little, so it's sideways. I stamped my name on the paper, so the red mark is rightside up.

Sydney, I will try to find something fun to send you for show and tell. The post office in Japan is different than here. We haven't tried using it yet to mail things, so that might be the next big adventure.

In Nagoya!

Well, we're finally in Japan. It was a very long flight, but we slept most of the time. It was very strange to think that we were going to where it was already the next day. :)

When we got here, we had to get from the airport to the main island, which is called Honshu. The airport is actually sitting on a manmade island in the ocean. The man who met us at the airport said that the island is actually sinking all the time. To get to Honshu, we took a train. The trains in Japan are used by everybody, so they're very fast and clean and they always arrive on time. We actually took two trains. The second train is a very famous train, called the "Shinkansen." In English, we call it the "Bullet Train." It travels at 160 miles per hour, but when you're in the train, you barely feel it moving.

The seats in the train are very comfortable, and you're supposed to just sit back and relax and enjoy the ride. Many of the people who ride the train even take their shoes off while they're sitting down. A woman brings a trolley full of snacks through each car. You can buy chips, or chocolate, or something to drink, all sorts of things. The trolley itself plays cheerful music and the woman wears a yellow apron over her clothes.

When we finally got to our apartment in Nagoya, Aimee and I were very tired. But we love our apartment! You have to take your shoes off at the door, because it isn't polite to wear shoes in Japanese homes. The apartment is very small and neat, without very much furniture. Our bedrooms have tatami (tah-tah-mee) mats on the floor. These are thick mats made of a type of grass that has been woven together. These floors are softer, because the beds in Japan are like piles of mattresses on the floor. It took both of us an hour to figure out exactly how it all went together. When we finally had it all set (though we're still not sure if it's right), we were more than happy to just fall asleep on them.

Moving to Japan.

Mandy and I are moving so soon now! We will be leaving in about 9 days to go to Japan!

Japan is a country that is made up of a whole bunch of islands. It is a very small country! From top to bottom, it's about the size of the state of California... except that it has over a third of the number of people living there as we have in the whole big United States! It is a lot more crowded there - so people live much closer together and people have smaller houses.

We are moving to a city called Nagoya. If you think of Japan being shaped like a fish, Nagoya is right around the ticklish place behind the gills! That's an easy way to remember where we are! Nagoya has a castle and a lot of parks and places that are important to Japan's history.

We are going to get to Nagoya on an airplane. It will take about 17 hours in the air! That's a really really really long time - we're probably going to be bored or sleeping for a lot of it. When we get there, we will have travelled half way around the world. There's a big difference in the time it is where we are going to be and the time that it is where our families are. When it's nighttime in Japan, it'll be daytime in the United States!

We're very excited about going and we'll write more when we have the time - probably from Japan!

I love you, Sydney, Ryan, and Josh. :)
And everyone else, but you guys specifically.

Love,
Aimee