I am a camel

I watched a TV programme on Japanese TV at 1am last night where they actually taught the sentence, 'I am a camel'. WTF?

Not exactly everyday English now, is it? In fact, I don't recall having ever said that in my life.

One of my students was telling me her son has just started English lessons at school and he finds them boring as they learn things like, 'This is a pen'. I laughed and told her there'd been an article recently that I'd read (in Metropolis, maybe) that had been talking about the same thing, and how in language lessons the world over that is often the first sentence people get taught. And how utterly useless it is as a sentence.

I suggested, 'Where is the toilet?' should be everyone's first sentence in a new language.

Don't you agree?

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Today the builders started earlier than normal. They woke me up at 7am. Bastards. Guess who was NOT a happy bunny?

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However, the day wasn't all bad as the lovely Julia was in town! I had to work but had a two hour break and somehow a jetlagged Jules managed to follow my instructions and we found each other easily at Ikebukuro Station. Not such an easy feat if you consider I've had problems in the past meeting up with people there who live in Tokyo and who have phones with them!

I gave her a condensed Tokyo experience. We had a quick babble over sushi and I then took her to buy a present for her boss's wife (which took about five minutes).

Whilst women everywhere struggle to make friends with their inner goddess, or inner bitch, or whatever, I took Jules to make contact with her inner kitty. Talk about a kid in a toy shop..... If she'd had more time (and less shoes to carry home) I'm sure she'd have bought up half the Hello Kitty shop.

Hell, she was even suggesting new ranges they should come up with....

From there, and running a little bit short on time now, we went and did some puri cura (print club: see previous post). Of course, as I didn't actually operate the machine myself last time, it was all a bit hit or miss, but we had a laugh posing and trying to not be knocked out by the new screens that kept dropping down in the machine.

Decorating them was also a giggle, although I did have to get the help of some school girls to print them out. We could have spent hours in there but, unfortunately, I had to get back to work, and she had a plane to go and catch.

Lovely lunchbreak, no?

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P.S. I am a camel.