Well, I’m here. The plane trip was torturous despite the kids being fairly well-behaved. I only started to sort of relax about two hours before landing and I was a mess till after the halfway point. Already dreading the return trip, a night flight…….will the pilots be too tired to fly that thing? How do they see at night? I know, I know, it’s all radars and stuff, but still, it’s freaky.
Where do I start about trips to Japan. My relationship with this place is so complex and I have such mixed emotions about it. Life in Australia is ok – boring but has its advantages. I don’t miss Australia when I’m away from it, though, like I do Japan.
Anyway, Haru has had a language explosion since we’ve been here. He had a solid base in a Japanese but was starting to resist speaking it to me in Australia. We had hoped this trip would give him some incentive to keep studying hard and speaking and it seems to be working. He’s totally into Japanese at the moment and told me to speak Japanese to him when I said something in English. I expect this motivation to wear off after a while back in Australia so we will try to make the trips back here more frequent. Haru actually did two things with language in the past two days that impressed me. First, he asked me to get some M-I-L-K. I spell it out to Shingo sometimes in front of Riyo instead of saying ‘milk’ and Haru has figured it out. He even wrote the letters down and could read it, so except for names, he can read a word now! About time! His reading in Japanese is better than most Japanese kids his age but hiragana is phonetic and much easier as soon as you know the 45 or so hiragana characters. His English reading isn’t very good, but his kindy teachers said he’s not behind or anything. But he can read milk, yay!
The other thing was that he made a joke in Japanese! Keep in mind that Haru has no sense of humor so this was surprising, haha.
In Japanese, the word to ask how much something is is ‘ikura’. Haru knows this and we sometimes play shops in Japanese even though the money amounts are in dollars. Last night, I was eating salmon roe which is also called ‘ikura’. I gave some to Haru and he asked me what it was. I told him it was ikura. He probably paused for about ten seconds before laughing. He asked me ‘Ikura desu ka?’ which can mean either ‘How much is it?’ or ‘Is it ikura?’ I said ‘ Ikura desu’ (It’s ikura). Then he said, ‘No, sono ikura ikura desu ka? Five dollars?’ (No, that ikura is how much? Five dollars?). He thought it was hilarious and kept saying ‘Mummy no ikura ikura desu ka?).
Maybe it’s not that clever, but it was totally unexpected from Haru!
More later…..
Japan Life 