Today I'm catching up on several things, the writing of which I already mentioned several times or talked about as an aside respectively.
But first:
A thanks to my parents for the Christmas package and above all for the Chistmas pastries!
I myself hardly ate anything of it since I rather distributed it to friends and acquaintances (first and foremost Japanese of course), to teach them a piece of real Christmas culture. To say they were exhilarated is an understatement. When I gave the people, after sharing in the German course, the remaining pastries for taking home they not only bagged the pieces but also the crumbs.
A heartful Thank you also to Pia and Bernhard for their great Christmas present, which they handed me per Amazon:
As customary in Japan it was packaged 4 times.
Here are "my" German students:
I more or less stumbled into that course by accident. My academic advisor teaches German (he also got the exchange programme with Graz on the roll) and in October he invited me to stop by the class and of course one cannot say no. The 2. teacher is, as already mentioned, the only Austrian I know here and since it was pretty enjoyable to help the Japanese with their language tries I got stuck and every Friday evening I'm now some sort of "Language aid" (at the time of the Tuesday course I have other classes). I can learn for my studies when the professors explain grammar and help the students with their exercises (good thing I had such a strict German teacher, this way a big chunk of German grammar actually got stuck in my head. Thanks Professor Hiti). Whereat Professor Trummer and I conspiratorial teach the Students in talking and during the exercises Austrian German. In addition I also explain to them the classic orthography ("better would be ß instead of ss, also because of the sprachgefühl/feel for language, and the pronunciation"), namely for all I care the new orthography can go to h... .
I held a presentation about Austria as well. A little bit of history, the Burgenland, my hometown including scenery photos and Austrian and regional culture respectively. For this topic I showed them photos of the concert band, Buschenschank (ed. untranslatable, please refer to Google or Wikipedia) and a short video of the folk dance group, as well as pictures of the Uhudler-wine route festival (ad Seidl and Berni: Not only my host family but also my students were taken with you).
Side note: Among the participants, who in general are all students, there are also two Ladies, one over 40 the other over 50 years old. In Japan this is nothing extraordinarily, often "senior students" are attending miscellaneous classes (mostly outside University fields) to educate themselves, with ambition, the two of them are one of the better of the class.
As covered, New Year cards are very popular in Japan. Below those which I sent my host family.
First picture: The 2 horizontal characters in the left upper-most corner account the card as New Years card, in that the post delivers it exactly on January 1st. If someone has a blank card one needs to add those or else it gets delivered earlier, which isn't that good, since the Japanese most rejoice if it arrives precisely on January 1st.
Second picture: Written by myself, attention, read from right to left. The red writing (kingashinnen) means "A happy New Year" and is a little old polite/courtly expression, which is nearly exclusively used in written language. In colloquial language other are in use but I simply like it traditional. The blue writing's meaning is approximately: "I thank you for your help (assistance, for everything), that you have done for me during the last year and hope that this year too our relationship will stay a good one." (not literally translated). Since the year of the mouse is around the corner, below that the usual mouse-motifs, although the ones on the right I drew myself. Indeed when it comes to art, drawing, painting etc., except music, I'm normally an absolutely untalented failure but I think those I managed to draw quite decent, though unfortunately the photo is too blurred as to one could make out the snow flakes well. As to why over the mice the year 20 is presented instead of 2008, that is part of the Japanese method of counting and I will explain it another time (ah, smells like "Supplement" part 2!)
And of course at the end of the card: The wishes in German.
Some photos from our visit to a club in Osaka:
On the right the female Swede, whose birthday we celebrated (some people are missing on the picture)
Mikael doesn't have his hands under control (then again he actually acted by request)
Two photos of the dance floor
These two still belong to lower levels, concerning "salacious" clothing.
(Although from the front they already were average)
As one can see with our companions, different ways are possible (a little bit more normal)
Interesting (and funny) facts/opinions about Japan:
The life in Japan is often very exhausting and wearying. Even during the student part of life, which is by many considered to be the best time with the most leisure time, it is nevertheless arduous, since many students, in addition to their studies and their club activities, also hold down a part time job, so that they can afford certain expenses, whereat the studies themselves are already expensive enough (several thousand Euro of study fees per year at a public university). Thanks to those demands, next to the "traditional" student life in respect of going out, one can, especially in Japan (rumor has it exists in other Asian countries too), observe an interesting phenomena: A decent percentage of students who brazenly sleep during lectures. In classes with smaller groups (5-15 people) it is not that predominant, but in classes with 30 and more some are already swaying in the arms of Morpheus. The most striking in that regard: It is being accepted and tolerated by the lecturing professors. For those know, that their students will enter the work force in the foreseeable future, and like amply known, this is truly no bed of roses in Japan. Since there is relatively few active collaboration on part of the students in the Japanese university system, and the review of the performance is mostly handled by exams, presentation and seminar papers, the sleeping has for the most part no influence on the semester end performance. Now, before some readers start to wistfully remember the earlier handling of attendance at Austrian universities, it has to be mentioned at this point, that yet at most lectures a mandatory attendance of 70 percent prevails. One can indeed sleep from time to time yet one has to be at least physically present, than latitude has its limits here as well.
Correspondingly, many students make use of possible free periods to treat themselves to a little sleep, like one might notice on the following photo. To the author this is greatly reminiscent of the time of his basic training at the Austrian Army, at which the soldiers too used every free minute to at least doze.
Note by the editorial department: There won't be a new report on next Wednesday, since I will be in Tokyo at that point, maybe again on the following Thursday or Friday.
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