These are more quotes from student essays that have come through my desk. Each quote is from a different essay by a different student, and original syntax and spelling have been maintained for the sake of authenticity.
On Love:
• “Love is danger word…”
On Staying Healthy:
• “[I do] Nothing. Is it about time I should worry about health? On the contrary, what about you?”
On Population Control:
• “In order to improve environment, I want to reduce number of people. If it falls down to half, we’ll use less electricity, fossil fuels, and so on. So I’m not going to get married in the future.”
On Forms of Words that Should Exist But Don’t:
• “No I amn’t.”
• “So it should be compulsory to learn English early…so we can learn it easilier.”
• “In terms of health, what importantest in food a day is breakfast.”
On Future Plans:
• “He wants to be farmer. His dream is to get married to a woman of matchless beauty.”
• “He has no hope for the future.”
• “She want to go to a college to learn education. She want to be a elementary school teacher because she likes children. Also, her dream is to marry. She will do her best.”
• “Her dream is an intercultural marriage.”
On How to Carry Large Pieces of Fruit:
• “A furoshiki is a one piece of square cloth. It’s very useful and environment-friendly. It’s up to your imagination how we use it. For example, we can wrap and bring a watermelon with it easier.”
On Hanafuda:
• “Hanafuda is one of Japanese game using cards with flower designs. There are twelve kinds of flowers that represent the twelve months of year. It’s like a nervous breakdown of cards in Europe.
The rule is very simple. So why don’t you play once?”
On False Impressions:
• “My brain works very actively. And my brain is very useful for studying. But I don’t use my perfect brain. So I am often said that Mr. Mizunoe is very fool. I think that I am a genius boy. So I want to say that I don’t use the all brain. I use a portion of my perfect brain. This is very mottainai. You had better not try to fool me.”
On Why You Might Bike Instead of Drive:
• “First, if he goes to his office slowly with a bike [instead of car], he can look around him. It makes him some exciting discoveries, so he likes it.
Second, he was swindled out of his money under a false promise of marriage. So he doesn’t have enough money.”
On Travel:
• “I want to go to Europe because rowing sports come from there…And also, I want to have real Italians.”
• “Reckless adventures ruin you.”
Friday, September 21, 2012
Monday, September 10, 2012
My Eco-Friendly Year : Trains
Last week marked the end of my nearly 400 days without a car. It was a day that should have come about 400 days earlier.
Before I came to Japan, I had visions of riding trains everywhere I needed to go, of the convenience of them all, of me with my nose buried in a book while scenic green rice fields rolled past in the background, surrounded by students and businessmen so plugged in they wouldn’t notice me stealing surreptitious glances in their respective directions.
But then I came to Japan.
And I realized that this romantic vision of train-as-primary-transportation really doesn’t work in reality, because the reality is that trains don’t drop you off in front of where you want to go. They take you to areas, towns, but not specific locations. Even if I took the train, I would still have to walk, bike, or bus to where I actually want to go, and, besides maybe a lovely ten-minute walk beside a river in the balmy autumn air, which never actually happened in reality either, these methods of completing journeys are not romantic and are not convenient and really just cancel out whatever enjoyment I may have gotten from the train ride itself. On which I never actually read a book anyway because there was too high a chance of me getting distracted and then missing my stop, and they don’t run often enough in my area of the middle-of-nowhere to make quick returns practical or timely options.
Akita is not Tokyo, and I don’t live in a movie.
I must always remind myself of these rudimentary facts.
Further, there’s the reality of not living all that close to the train station in my town, which requires a too-long walk or a bus ride to get to. And frankly, I really hate buses, I have always hated buses – despite the zealous attempts of my grandmother during my childhood to convince me that, really, they are great places to meet new people – and I will continue to hate buses, and on trains I never know where to look. Out the window awkwardly behind me? At the people sitting on the bench across from me? Certainly not eye-level with the people standing up and facing me!…which leaves an uninteresting spot on the floor to study, and even then I usually can’t affect that practiced, glazed over, Japanese stare into nothingness, and it’s more like me, making everyone else on the train uncomfortable because the gaijin girl can’t keep her eyes to herself. It’s just unpleasant for everyone involved.
So, generally, the train situation could have been better, and again my naïve ideas about life in Japan shatter into a million pieces upon actual execution in real life. It wouldn’t be the first time, and even 400 days into my ex-pat existence here, I doubt it will be the last.
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