I got up early to pack and get ready and arrived only about five minutes late at the office, just in time for the final “gambarimasho!” of the weekly meeting.\u00c2\u00a0 Miss Shimizu and I soon left to catch our train to Gifu.\u00c2\u00a0 This involved my first experience of people squeezing their way into an already full train.\u00c2\u00a0 At the next station, half of them spilled out.\u00c2\u00a0 Two stations later, the car was almost empty.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
The sun had come out and shone on the countryside we zipped through with the shinkansen.\u00c2\u00a0 First, a sea of buildings, then a series of tunnels punctuated by flashes of buildings, then the Shizuoka tea plantations and for a brief moment the top of Mt. Fuji to the right.\u00c2\u00a0 Then, the chemical companies (such as the Pocari Sweat works), the plains, and again a sea of buildings as Nagoya approached.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n
It’s nice having a Japanese accompany me on travels because I continually learn what I still do wrong.\u00c2\u00a0 Miss Shimizu told me off for whistling the shinkansen jingle inside the train – it’s impolite to make any noise in a closed but public room.\u00c2\u00a0 Then, I chucked my pet bottle with a little too much gusto and attracted the attention of a middle-aged lady in a pink one-piece who kept checking me out after that.\u00c2\u00a0 But having a Japanese like Miss Shimizu with me is particularly good for my language skills, because every time I make a mistake, she laughs and then corrects me.\u00c2\u00a0 Hers is a laugh of genuine amusement and not of mockery – it’s the way I feel like laughing when a friend makes a funny mistake in German.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n