It seems like I return to Japan after a brief time away and discover some new wonderful weirdness.

Don't hold your breath waiting for the movie though.
Ets and I spent the afternoon in Chiba walking around and doing a spot of retail therapy before leaving at just after 5 and making our way down to Kisarazu where her dad picked us up and whisked us off to the Yanagawa household where her mum had dinner prepared.

It was quite pleasant and I was my usual charming self over the dinner of a ham salad, Japanese spring rolls, breaded pork cutlets, potato gratin, and a Japanese rice dish all washed down with Japan's finest. Most refreshing.

Aside from gorging ourselves on the homecooked marvels of Mrs. Yanagawa, Ets showed her parents the pictures we took in Malaysia especially extolling the gastranomic delight that is roti canai.

So not quite the summer blockbuster then. It could make for a nice ad about a tiny segment of Malaysian cuisine though.

That's it for now. Just walked in the door not too long ago and Ets arrived shortly after and is cooking lunch for me since it's her day off and all (^_^)v

Guess it's my turn now.
Ets said she'll be going down to Kisarazu to visit her parents on the 16th and asked if I wanted to go with her.

I came across an interesting tidbit of information in uni today. A certain Alexander Guiora did some research into the effects of alcohol (among other things) on students' pronunciation (and by some extension, acquisition) of a foreign language.

Much as how you and I, in spite of how eloquent or verbose we might be in our native language, would be uncertain and tentative in a foreign language, alcohol's ability to lower inhibitions would logically be of some benefit in foreign language learning.

"Guiora and his colleagues found out that moderate amounts of alcohol insignificantly lowered mental reasoning while significantly increasing oral production skills."

I think he found out that this peaked at about 1.5 drinks.

I mentioned that this was interesting particularly because I have experienced this first hand . In my final year of uni, I was staying at Chaucer College and was celebrating my birthday. I was a little inebriated and so were my friends (by "a little", I mean "quite" and by "quite", I mean "very"). So as the alcohol took effect and greased the linguistic centres of the brain (or quite possibly the brain in its' entirety), it came to be that all the native English speakers all spoke bad Japanese and all the native Japanese speakers spoke bad English. Not so sure about our mental reasoning but by gum did out oral production skills increase.

Back from home to ... home? Well, my home away from home at any rate.

Anyway, got back last Tuesday evening and feel sufficiently rested (and motivated) to blog again. This whirlwind trip back home was a lot busier than any I remember save for maybe that one week thing at the end of 2004 and even that one didn't feel quite this ... packed.Did a lot of shopping. Even more than ets and managed to sneak my sauces and powdered drinks past customs (not that bringing in sauces and granulated beverages are illegal).
Managed to meet up with a few ppl this time round but spent quite a lot of time with the folks and the extended family (and ended up drinking a lot of wine in the process).
Ets got to do everything she wanted to do which was accomplished with some deft scheduling courtesy of my dad (all the sightseeing places were done in a day) AND we managed to get in a 3D/2N stay at the beach. Just to show how tight the schedule was, only a few people (excluding family) got to meet ets. You know who you are so count yourselves lucky ^_^

Here are the pics which were promised long ago.