Yes we can!

This still makes me laugh. I was walking down to the train station at Mikage (down the hill from my halls) on Saturday, when, as I passed by the local high school (which incidentally is one of Kobe University`s high schools), a bunch of the kids (school on Saturday I`m afraid) see me walking past. Immediately one of them shouts, and I swear I am not making a word of this up:

「オバマ大統領！！！！」

Which means...

"President Obama!!!!!"

What can I say, Japan is a weird place to be a foreigner...

That wasn`t even the weirdest part of the day... (that would be a toss-up between introducing myself as a paving slab in French (to some French people I hasten to add), or being mistaken for a drug-dealer by some fat Russians in a club...)

(For those keeping count, that`s now David Beckham, Nick from the Backstreet Boys and now Obama様 (sama, more polite, honourific version of san, for example, the emperor is Tenno-sama) for whom I`ve been "mistaken"). I think Nick is a distinct step down from the other two... If the next person is anything less than someone on, say, Will Smith-fame level I`ll be deeply insulted...

Oh, and Japan may be having a stab at challenging Scotland for the "most unpredictable weather" trophy. This morning it was 10C and sunny, 2 hours later it was snowing, then freezing but raining, and now it`s clear and relatively mild...

Oh, and most importantly, I HAD CHEESE ON TOAST TODAY!!!!!! Proper cheese on toast! Japanese cheese is a bit like the Matrix (yay for Rage Against the Machine btw), no-one can be told of it`s full horror, you have to see it with your own eyes. However, lo and behold, I found (actually, Baz showed me) a little coffee shop where they do it properly! Now if only I could find a real Pizza and a lawn to sit on... Funny what you end up missing.

Finally, I`ll just mention why I`m typing this right now, here in the faculty library. I was walking back to Rokko train station to get the train back home when I decided to call Kaori-san in Tokyo for a catch-up. At the end of the conversation I realised I`d actually managed to walk all the way to campus, about 15 mins past the train station... oops.

Oh, and I did mean to talk about the surreal Second Language Acquisition class here (though to be honest, surreal has been the norm for the past 3 months now...). Oh well, there`s always next time...