works of wanderlust

Tag: japan

  • head over feets, thirteen

    Lucky.

    All good things begin with the number thirteen, right?

    The race kinda wrapped our season, however you look at it, and as an autumn overseas vacation looms I’ve been contemplating things besides long distance training. That said, I’ve been trying to get in some physical activity amid dealing with a minor health issue this past couple weeks.

    On my docket were…

    Tuesday, after a full day and some of post-race recovery, I drove across town to the pool. Gah, I’m getting so tired of not having a pool close by… but I deal and in a couple weeks the local one will be through it’s refurb and I can get back into that groove over the winter. For now tho, laps in Mill Woods.

    I didn’t do much the week that followed the race, but on Sunday (in the wake of the daylight savings time change) we were back to our regular meetup and coffee club run, logging eight klicks in what suddenly felt a lot like impending winter weather. The leaves are all well-gone and there were icy patches on the trail because the temps were hanging out below zero when we started. Long pants weather for sure.

    Did I mention that I gave up caffeine? I don’t know that it is a permanent switch up quite yet, but I’m testing out a theory around this persistent cough I’ve been fighting and I feel like it might be less of a respiratory issue and more of a reflux issue. Too much info, I know, but them’s the reality of my so-called fitness life. So I’m off caffeine for a month or so… meaning I spent most of this week in full on withdrawal. Headaches, muscle aches, general tired and grumpiness. All that, along with a dose of snow late in the week meant I didn’t really get out much at all for a few days.

    I did make my way to the pool again on Friday morning and I swam a bunch of laps. The post-caffeine withdrawal phase felt pretty good and my lungs feel like they’ve opened up. I actually had a mighty good swim and then a nice long soak in the hot tub.  I doubt I’ll have a chance to get in another swim before vacation tho, and hopefully my home pool will be open again when we get back, so fingers crossed that’s my last drive across town for a swim for a long while. It is a really nice pool, but a thirty minute drive was a little much.

    Of course, Sunday despite the flipping cold weather, we met up at the rec centre as usual for an eight klick run. Just as much to remind me of my caffeine withdrawal as anything else, it was a slog. I ran out of gas around six klicks in and ended up doing some walking. I have been doing a whole nutritional reset as part of trying to get this reflux issue under control before our trip, so I’m sure I was just in a bit of calorie debt, too. Ugh! Getting old.

    On Monday I sat down and worked out a game plan for Japan: I’m bringing along one change of running gear, my watch (of course) and I bought some new running shoes to double as fresh travel, walking around shoes but which will more than serve in case I opt to go out running. My best bet is to hope I’m not too jet lagged that I can make a Park Run just a few days after we arrive, and if not that, there is another one much later in the trip. Otherwise, it looks like I might just scope out the streets and parks of Tokyo and try and find a nice homemade route. Travel running is always a glorious challenge.

  • urban sketch, four

    I’m nearly three-quarters of the way through my October sketching challenge as I write this and I have yet to miss a day.

    Two things have emerged from that effort:

    First, I think my drawing has legitimately improved. Doing anything daily is inevitably going to contribute to the effort of general practice and growth, but there is always the risk of hitting a plateau and not realizing any noticeable gains. Self-perception is hard. Self-evaluation is even more difficult. But drawing every day feels a bit like running every day: you build on the gains from the day before and the vibe is never really given to a recovery phase where things stagnate or decay back to the starting state. Whatever that metaphor means for the effort of learning an artistic skill, it feels like it is meaningful here as a comparison.

    Second, me concern for lacking meaningful subject matter in the aesthetic wasteland that is the suburban clutter that is the place I live has ebbed into a kind of seeking the beauty of nature fighting against the cookie-cutter-ness of this world. Sure, the houses and windows and rooflines all start to look the same, but the trees are poking out around them in different ways and framing scenes with a kind of pleasing quality that I am getting better each day at noticing. I think that is important. I mean, I wrote earlier about my struggles with getting out of the photographer’s mindset and of moving away from thinking of my sketches as photos with an ink pen instead of pixels. I think I am starting to feel that vibe a little more strongly as I plonk myself down in unlikely places and frame a scene with sharp inked lines to give a sense of something beyond what is just there.

    My plan with this effort was to re-prime my sketching senses before we head off on a vacation where I think the world will be significantly more sketch-able than suburban prairie Canada. Japan is graced with interesting architecture and a kind of shinto-driven aesthetic that emboldens spaces with a kind of symmetry and beauty that one could spend a lifetime studying to attempt to understand. I have a couple weeks to sketch it, so I wanted to go in hot and ready as I have ever been to draw it—and draw from it.

  • japanese, part three

    I am approaching fifty, but attending an introductory language class kinda makes me feel like I’m in kindergarten again. We count in unison, ask each other our names and ages, play games identifying colours, and get stickers for good work. 

    I also have the least interesting origin story of the bunch, I’ve concluded. Everyone else seems to have a much better reason to be learning a challenging new language than my “I just decided to learn something new” one day reply. 

    One guy has family in Japan and he’s trying to learn how to talk to his grandmother. He already seems to know quite a lot and jumps to answer almost every question before my brain can even start to do the back and forth translation and get words to my mouth.

    Another guy is trying to immigrate there and wants some basic proficiency under his belt before he leaves. He spent the break yesterday getting help from the teaching assistant proofreading an email he needed to send about his immigration process or something—I only half listened from across the room.

    I was chatting with another dude after class and he had apparently grown up in Japan because his parents were working there when he was very young, and was fluent in Japanese at one point. There were recordings of himself speaking as a kid and he decided he wanted to be able to understand what his younger self was saying so… language classes.

    And me. Just interested. Lifelong learner, I reply. I dabble—I am just in a phase. Will I still be poking at this in a year? It would seem a bit of a waste, otherwise, right?

    In a month or so we’ll be in Japan. Immersed. 

    I’ve got a few basic phrases locked into my brain, but the daily drilling of new ones goes in fits and starts and I’m not as consistent as I need to be with the effort. Also, my brain is not as young and spongelike as it used to be. In one ear and out the other, is how the phrase goes.  I can say it twenty times in class and seem to have it just right, but then—out of context, perhaps—I can’t seem to latch back onto it again.

    Learning languages is not for everyone. It seems like some people just get it—or at least they are faking it way better than I am. I persevere, but am humbled by the effort.

  • japanese, part one-ish

    I have written here previously about a couple of my self-study efforts to start learning Japanese, in part for our upcoming trip to Tokyo, but also just as—well—something interesting to pursue. Skills, languages, all that stuff—it broadens the mind, right?

    I figured I would make my updates a bit more formal because as of last week I signed up for actual in-person lessons. Right-o. Things are getting a bit more serious all of a sudden. The local Japanese Society, a cultural organization made up of and supporting Japanese immigrants happens to have a series of courses to teach the language to anyone interested in learning.

    The first class of my introduction to Japanese is tomorrow evening.

    We have a homework, tests, and cultural things to do in between classes.

    I just passed something like day 175 in Duolingo, and my hiragana and katakana skills are starting to settle into a comfortable familiarity—by which I mean I have about fifty percent recognition of the characters and their sounds. This is probably more-so with the hiragana, for now, but I’m starting to be able to look at characters when I see them out in the wild and sound things out. I mean, I usually don’t have the vocabulary to know what the word means, but I can sound it out—which is a great start, I think.

    I also bought myself a dictionary. That’s it. Nothing special to add about it, other than like any time I bought a translation dictionary it is a fun time looking up words and just flipping around through the pages looking for curiosities. 

    And, less useful but maybe interesting as the project progresses, our next door neighbours are hosting an exchange student from Japan for the year and she has already poked her nose over the fence to say hi (mostly to meet the dog, of course) and maybe there will be some opportunities to speak to her in Japanese when I get some lessons (and verbal confidence) under my belt.

    But the core of it, really, I think is the lessons. Eight weeks of three hour focused instruction before we go, and then I can try the test for the second level course and keep going in the new year and when we’re back from our vacation. By next summer I suppose I could have some serious progress.

  • hiragana two

    Our plans to leap over the Pacific are become more real with each passing day, and my progress in dabbling in acquiring at least some Japanese language prior to that trip is progressing with promise.

    Sorta.

    Fluency? Heck no.

    But I am hopeful that I won’t be completely overwhelmed by even simple basics in a radically foreign country (for us, anyhow) by the time we step off that plane.

    For an English-speaking middle-aged guy who was never very good at spoken languages, Japanese has been something of a new yet familiar challenge. I have been using a multi-pronged approach that includes flash cards, Duolingo, online resources and eating large amounts of sushi. The last one probably isn’t helping much, if I’m honest… but I only half contest that because our local sushi place does use hiragana on their menu and it really does lightly boost my confidence as I start to recognize the characters better with each passing visit.

    I also forced myself into a tougher difficulty setting on Duolingo when I just recently realized I could shut off the Romanised hints in the lessons and force myself to start thinking in the hiragana characters and not just the English-like phenomes.

    None of this is an endorsement for Duolingo. I just happened to have an account and I just happened to get it for a student discount because I was registered in University.

    My take on the whole do-it-yourself, language-in-a-can approach is of course, and has always really been, one of cautious skepticism. I’ve generally been poor at languages because ranked in order I would often put my personal verbal communications skills near the bottom of my list, even in English. I won’t say I’m bad at it, but I am much better at writing and visual communication methods. I’m also a bit of an introvert, and as much as I would hesitate to ever use that as an excuse for any kind of failure to participate, I do admit that I am less inclined to strike up conversations in general… and significantly less inclined to strike up conversations in a second language. It’s just a personal quirk that I should probably get over and work on, to be honest. But to that whole point, sitting on the couch and talking to my phone, and getting frustrated because my pronunciation is either wildly off or the speech recognition is weak or maybe I’m just not learning how to talk with Japanese words is something that I do put squarely on my methodology and thus on the effectiveness of these little language lesson services. They are better than nothing, I admit, but by how much I’m yet to be sure.

    That is to say, I could probably learn much better passable Japanese by signing up for a course and being forced to talk to strangers in a classroom a few nights per week than I can ever hope to learn by unlocking little digital badges and gaming the game that I downloaded on my phone.

    And ALL of that is to tell you that what I am actually really feeling good about learning through this app is the written portion of the exam: the hiragana. I probably can’t speak well enough to be understood, and my brain locks up when I try to listen to a spoken phrase and damned if I can remember more than a few dozen words of vocabulary BUT I have started to get my mind around the character set.

    The Wife is in the narrowing of date options phase of trip planning. It may sound slightly insane but our trip window now hinges on the ride maintenance schedule at Tokyo Disneyland. Really. But it seems like we’ll be seeking a pair of seats to Tokyo before the year is out, and that is super-exciting.

    And if nothing else, at least I’ll be able to order us some tea when we arrive.