Everything I need to know I learned from a TV egg.

From the annals of giving advice that you don't take, one of my ostensibly high level students who speaks in the choppiest sentences and learns the past perfect and then tries to say, "I had been to the supermarket yesterday," asked me for some advice to improve his English. "Well, do you practice at home? Do you speak alone out loud?" Of course not, he said. He only practices in class. And he says things in his head at home. This is clear from his performance in class. The words leave his mouth for the first time with all the grace of me on figure skates. I told him to talk to himself alone in the mirror, anything, but he has to start talking more. Then he remembered that in the past week he had actually used English at home. He saw a cockroach and, shoe in hand, he yelled at the pest, "I'll kill you!"

It's wonderful useful advice that I gave and I hope to take it some day. Actually, my language exchange partner, who is mostly self-taught and really good at English, always practices talking out loud alone. I also practice talking out loud alone. I just rarely manage to do it in Japanese. Although I do repeat a TV channel character named "teretama," meaning TV egg. The egg is sitting on a hill and he says, "ii tenki da ne," good weather isn't it? then he says, "iitedakimasu" and tries to take a bite of a big, big onigiri and then rolls down the hill yelling "ahhhhh." I have gotten so good at that and can talk about the weather just like him. There is also one where he is in the hot spring and he says, "oh it's nice and warm" and then he says "oh no! I'm going to become a boiled hot spring egg!" So I am fully prepared to speak in Japanese if that situation were to happen to me. "Onsen Sofii ni natchau!"

Moreover, I am such a dedicated student of spoken Japanese that I can repeat all the things the child students say, which have varying degrees of utility. My favorite is from little Tomoyuki, the smiliest child, who came to school one day and proudly announced, "a big one! a big one! There is a big, big dumpling in my bag!"

Here is a character of my own creation. I call him, "Benkyou binii", the study bean.

One of these is not like the other

The Beach

Rode Thai Air

Am back from Thailand. It's raining here in Tokyo and I am miles from the beach. What a world. But no matter, I will carry the beach with me inside as long as I can. But eventually it will get forgotten and washed away, like a vacation always does.




I went snorkeling for the first time, which was highly delightful. Having never been to the beach in Mexico or the Caribbean I have to say it was a little weird to be the wealthy foreigner and all the more weird because the Thai women don't sit out on the beach and get tan, so it felt like we weren't sharing it with them. But I was happy to see that during the late afternoon sun, when you don't burn, the Thais would picnic on the boardwalk and the kids would play in the waves. Granted Patong Beach is perhaps the last place to go to for a slice of Thai life. I haven't seen that many westerners in a long time. Moreover, most Asian women, except perhaps for the Japanese girls who like hip-hop style, have a fear of "being black" and are pretty covered up at the beach (also due to more conservative dress standards).

The boys who worked on beach renting chairs, jet skis and what not were a very nice dark color, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder as when I was just sitting in the sand a few Thai ladies and their daughters, from a farther off province, asked to take pictures with me! I saw a similar thing in the airport when Chinese girl took pictures of a little German toddler with gold ringlets.

One surprise of the trip was talking to the Thai employees of HIS, the Japanese travel agency that we booked our tickets through, in Japanese. Here in Japan we had been explained that transport to and from the airport was included, but I had though that meant a hotel shuttle. But no! It was a shuttle by our travel agency who knew how to recognize us by the pens we were told to wear around our necks, proudly marking us off as Japanese tourists. Our Thai representative spoke excellent Japanese and it made sure to explain everything to us ad naseum, in true Japanese style. As Japanese customers, we were even recommended a massage package called "kimuchii kousu" (feel-good course), which was about 3 times as much as the prices described in the lonely planet. The way back was more fun though, we had a couple more lively guides who were highly amused to be dealing with us and we joked around with them in Japanese. It was fun to practice Japanese but it was also nice because it was the most I actually got to talk to Thais that brief trip. Tourist trap or not Phuket was wonderful.



Temple dumping grounds