2001-08-06 - 11:22 a.m.
gomennasai, watashi wa amerika ji desu
On all forms of public transportation here--buses, subway, luxury and commuter trains--there are these chimes that sound when you get near a stop, or sometimes for other reasons that we haven:t been able to figure out. There are variations on the chimes, but there:s a pretty standardized set of ascending sugary notes that play on most buses and subways.
It happens that they sound almost exactly like the beginning of "Denton, U.S.A." from the film Shock Treatment. Every time I hear them, I want to remark on this to somebody (actually, it's even worse than that; I want to start singing), but of course there is nobody traveling with me to whom the remark would be comprehensible.
This is only one of many such circumstances I've encountered on this trip.
I still have at least one secret language to speak here, though, because everyone in my family shares my embarrassingly encyclopedic knowledge of Monty Python, and our fumbling with the phrasebook has produced plenty of variations on the "My hovercraft is full of eels!" theme. ("I will not buy this wasabi; it is scratched.")
I see that I promised earlier to tell y'all about how I found out what the "Kamo" in Kamo River indicates. (The Kamo, for those of you just joining us, is the river that runs next to the hotel we stayed in in Kyoto.) The way it happened was, we were having breakfast in the hotel, and next to the restaurant was a little branch of the river, full of koi (gorgeous carp--think of a fat goldfish 18 inches long) and ducks. I wanted to know what the Japanese word for "duck" was, so I took one of the waitresses aside before we left and asked. Her English was almost nonexistent, though, so I just pointed, consulted my phrasebook, and asked, in Japanese, what that thing was called in Japanese.
"Kamo," she said. Now, I knew the *river* was the Kamo, so, while it made sense for the river to be named for the ducks, I wanted to clear up any possible confusion. I:ve never been one to value dignity above clarity, so I pointed again, said, "the ducks--quack, quack--those are kamo?" flapping my arms a little to illustrate the "quack, quack." Unfortunately, this caused the waitress to say a whole lot of other things in Japanese and broken English, causing me to think that "kamo" actually did *not* mean the ducks, so we had to babble back and forth a bit, with first me and then the poor waitress, who probably didn:t usually have to do things like this as part of her job, repeating the "quack, quack" pantomime. Finally we got back to the where we:d started and established definitively that the ducks, quack quack, were called kamo, just like the river. I thanked her effusively. She was very friendly and patient through the whole incomprehensible business, and while the conversation was bemusing, if she thought it was at all *odd*--or if she had something more important to do--she gave no hint of it.
That's service.
Some more Engrish t-shirts for your reading pleasure:
new oneself is found
CASH from CHAOS
HEAR THIS
HOT SHOUT
RUMBLE IS NOT AN OPTION
We face in the next generation, and must leave something
If it like his thing, there is only to do its best
FICTIVE
HYSTERIC GLAMOUR
relieves tension
Sophisticated is the word for
Three Cheers For Nothing
"as long as they don't use monkeys"
Today's title translates to "I'm sorry, I am an American."
I believe in yesterday --- I love ya, tomorrow
test - 2017-10-08
boing - 2003-06-07
walk walk trudge trudge slog slog travel travel - 2003-05-21
ob-la-di - 2003-05-18
not dead. - 2002-12-08
What do you get when you multiply six by