I leave my friend's house to go meet another friend and a popular journalist, whose expertise is on marriage. She is interviewing me about my view on said topic. She says she needs to go to Disneyland this evening because the storm ("arashi" in Japanese) is coming. I exclaim "Really? I didn't bring an umbrella, because my friend said it wouldn't rain today." The interviewer looks at me strangely, and says that Arashi is the name of a popluar band. Things like this happen all the time this trip. Words that used to exist no longer do, while new words are created. At the same time, I discover that useless words and knowledge have been stashed away in the little archive folder in my brain and pop out unexpectedly. The brain seems to work a little bit like a sewer pipe. Now that I have been speaking Japanese for almost a week, the vocabulary and knowledge base that had been clogged up, is flowing relatively freely.
Drinks and dinner with different sets of friends ensue. I stagger back home to find that an uncouth business partner has misbehaved. We deal with this hiccup well into the night, and write him off. Good thing we make this decision now and not later.
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That happens on the first day of school, when the first math lesson comes, it's like a rusty hose being used after 1000 years of disuse.
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