01/28/10 room, night- I started home from the Sakae bank misadventure only to find the misadventure had just begun. I rode the subway to the train station without mishap but then things came to a dead halt. I got on the train that was bound for Kōzōji, which is my stop. I proceeded to wait in that train for two hours. No trains were moving all along the line. The train’s intercom kept apologizing for the horrible wait. I let myself get lost in thought for a while but then decided to study.
Finally the train started moving. It stopped again at Jinryo station and most of the passengers got off to wait for another train that would be able to take them the rest of the way down the line. When we pulled into Jinryo everyone started craning to look out the windows. I did likewise and saw two paramedics carrying a stretcher with a covered form on it. I got on the train that took me the one more stop to Kōzōji and took the bus back to my host mom’s. I only walked in the dark for two minutes. I was glum and just wanted to be back at my host mom’s house. I knew what had had happened the moment I saw the stretcher. Later though I looked it up on the internet and sure enough:
On the 27th around 3:30pm, on the grounds of the JR Chuo Line station, Jinryo, in Kasugai City (Aichi Prefecture). Also, in Seto City (Aichi), a jobless woman (30) was hit by the "Central Liner #14" bound for Nagoya Station from Nakatsugawa.
I was one of those 21,600 and it affected me more than just making me sit in a train for two hours. I couldn’t set up a bank account like I wanted and had been stressing out about that. I was exhausted and starving and had wanted to get home to get work done. After realizing there had been a suicide I was completely out of sorts. I was glum and depressed when I finally walked into the genkan (entrance way) of my host mom’s house. I did my best to explain why I was so late. My host mom was sympathetic to my defeated mood. She said “Taihen desu nee!” That one’s difficult to translate. “Taihen” has no exact English equivalent. It can be translated as hectic, difficult, rough, horrible, ridiculous etc. You could write a page of text in English and you still would not convey all of the feeling of the word “taihen”. Suffice it to say, you never want things to be “taihen”. My host mom said it’s so “taihen”! But after that she didn’t enable me to just mope around. She gave me delicious snacks and made me talk about my day and my plans for the evening and for the next day. She told me about her day and told me to be “genki” (energetic or spirited). Well by the end of our talk I was in fact “genki” yet again and it was all thanks to her (and her delicious food). :3
Dinner and homework and shower time and more homework and an entry, it’s all kind of a blur. I went to bed, woke up, ate breakfast, wrote a short entry, and was leaving for the bus stop when my host mom said she was driving me to the station. It was a nice surprise. I had told her about getting to campus early for final registration. She dropped me off and I got to campus 45 minutes early. It is NICE being early I tell you. I visited Koibito (my locker, that’s its name, look in a previous entry if you want to know what it means). I checked my mail slot. I shot the breeze with Erin, Marissa, and Leigh. I STUDIED. I talked to Kai when she arrived.
Finally final registration began and I switched my Cultural History of Tea Ceremony class from “credit” to “audit” and added Elementary Translation. Done and done. We had class and a tango quiz (vocab). When the last class section was almost over we were told that the two class sections would be redone starting after our upcoming week break. We are being scrambled. We were given the list of who would be in which section after the break. I am still in section two but some of the people are different now. Kai is still in section one though. (Kai told me she liked my hair color today. I said I like hers. She said she likes mine better. Oi. Never seen anyone so happy over brownish blond hair before.)
I ate lunch in the locker room and noticed a bookshelf of manga in one corner. I picked up a manga that has been adapted to an anime that I am familiar with. I opened it and was surprised to find fuligana. Fuligana is pronunciation written above kanji. It doesn’t help you know the meaning of the kanji but you at least know how to say it and can look it up. (you can look up kanji too but it’s way more difficult) If I can find manga that has fuligana, reading might actually be in the realm of possibility!
At 1:20 I went to Cultural History of Tea Ceremony class that started at 1:30. There were only about 6 or 7 of us this week. Last week there had been around 20. I sat there for 2 hours and 15 minutes trying to glean meaning so hard I think I sprained my brain a little. However the professor commended me for coming back and said, “It’s really difficult huh?” [he used “taihen”] I said, “Gambalimashou.” (I will do my best.) The verb “gambaru” means to do one’s best but it’s connotation is like “to fight, to persevere”. He was happy to hear this. :) I’ll bet he was happy to still have a class.
I went to check my mail slot again after class and ran into Tana and Doug who are both in IJ 500. Tana is my friend from the University of Rochester and Doug is another IES abroad student. We talked for a bit and agreed that things have been so “taihen” (meaning hectic here) lately we haven’t gotten to hang out much. We agreed to hang out together soon. She asked if I was heading home and I said yes. She asked which station I was going to and I said Nagoya Daigaku, which is different from the one she uses. I told her my commute is an hour and a half and she said that’s awful. I agreed that it is “taihen”. Are you starting to feel what “taihen” is? ;D
We said bye and I went and got my quiz from my mail slot. I got a ten out of ten, which surprised me. I had looked up an answer that I had been unsure of after the quiz and I had thought that I had spelled it wrong. If you spell it wrong on a vocab test, it’s wrong. You might get partial credit if it’s close. I looked at this word and it was spelled wrong just as I thought. I was one symbol off, but it was marked right. I always feel guilty when this happens to me. Later, I wrote the right spelling in ink on my paper.
I stopped by Koibito again and then went home. It was an uneventful commute this time, thank goodness. I had my snack, I ate dinner, I studied, I had shower time, and studied some more. Kanji test tomorrow. Joy. Taihen. At least I finally caught up to the present. Time to sleep. (23:52)
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