Month: June 2016

Many department stores use their basements as the food floor and you can imagine how convenient it is for workers to be able to pick up an entrée or side dishes to go with the dinner meal.  Tourists too can pick up a reasonably priced meal to enjoy at the hotel.  I picked up a bento box one day from the Takashimaya Department Store, located next to the Namba Station in Osaka. The food was extremely fresh.  I purchased a salad from the conbini near my hotel to complete my meal.  You will begin to notice that the Japanese love corn.  They often use it as a garnish for salads and keep cans in their pantries, order corn chowder at restaurants, and I even noticed corn salad sushi that came around on the conveyor belt when I dined at a kaitensushi restaurant.

I purchased this chirashi box from one of the eateries at Namba Walk, an underground shopping mall located between Nippombashi and Namba subway stations.

Excuse me, I’m sorry, thank you

If you’re a first time traveler to Japan, you might be glad to know that one of the most useful words in the Japanese language is sumimasen (すみません).  It can mean excuse me, I’m sorry, or thank you.  I heard it many times and I’ve said it myself when asking “Sumimasen, where is the train station?”  My taxi driver drove me to my cruise ship and he asked the guard, “Sumimasen, where should I drop my passenger off?”  When you want to get the attention of the waitress, you would start your conversation by saying sumimasen.  When you accidentally bump into someone on the train or on the escalator, you would say sumimasen.  If someone returns your umbrella that you left on the bus, you would say sumimasen.  Go to Japan and you will hear it too!

Tutors

When I planned my trip to Japan in 2012, I wanted to learn as much Japanese as I could before meeting my relatives for the first time.  I signed up for a weekly Japanese language class at a senior community center where I met people with different levels of knowledge.  I soon discovered that some of the students had been attending the class for seven years and had not made any progress toward fluency.  Since I was in a hurry, I asked a favorite waitress at the local sushi restaurant if she could help me.  She said she was from Okinawa and did not want me to learn her dialect, so she gave me contact information for her friend (I’ll call her Maiko) who grew up in Tokyo.  Maiko showed me how to change the language settings on my computer to type in Japanese and helped me compose emails to my relatives.  We even spoke with my relatives using Skype.  It was a great experience.   

When I returned from my trip, I signed up with tutors over the next two years.  However, a weekly hour with a tutor was not helpful – and the cost – usually $35 to $40 an hour for a block of ten lessons was not working for me.  Once the session ended, I went back to my English speaking world and did not reinforce what I had learned.  Considering the math, I decided that the tutoring money was better spent booking flights to Japan whenever I could and immersing myself in the language and culture of Japan.  Every trip brings chances for practicing the language, tasting delicious food, and experiencing memorable and joyous times with my relatives.