Living in a fish bowl??? Ok, that's not a fish bowl, it's a coffee bowl (don't ask). Anyway my point being sometimes it feels as if I live in this bowl and all of the Japanese people stroll by and peek into the bowl and observe me and my life. I repeat, "sometimes" it feels that way, not all of the time. There are days when I float around and do my thing and I don't mind the extra attention. In fact it's pretty amusing and who doesn't like attention. However there are times when you have private matters that you don't want to be everyone's business. You just wish you could cover up that bowl and hide from the prying Japanese curiosity. Being here a year, I've gotten use to the quirks of being a foreigner; being stared or oogled at, being spoken to in English even if it doesn't make any sense (man passed me on the street and said, "It's super"), asking my Japanese friends to help me with simple things that my poor language skills can't cope with (I now have many Japanese "mothers" my age. Help me Mom, oh I mean Emiko!), being asked my age, height, and weight almost weekly, etc...... (there's more, I'm just tired of typing them). Well today was a fish bowl day for Rich. He's tried twice now to deal with the national health insurance. I'm of little help with this because when I arrived, everything was already taken care of. When he went to the town hall to fill out the form, my supervisor stopped him and "tried" to help. His 30 minutes of trying turned into Rich trying not to strangle the man. My supervisor started asking 100 personal questions (fish bowl prying) about Rich's job, salary, etc. My supervisor doesn't even deal with health insurance. Rich ended up leaving the town hall without completing his task or speaking to the insurance department. This is the second time a Japanese man has tried to help Rich. The last time resulted in an easy flat tire fix turning into a completly broken bike that we can't use now. So tomorrow, our very dear and helpful bilingual friend, Masaya will be going with Rich (like a proud father) to the town hall to sign him up for insurance. It's a hard reality to be 30 years old and not able to deal with small issues in life. Very frustrating and very much a part of living in Japan.
Wednesday, August 02, 2006
Blah, Blah, Blah.......
Living in a fish bowl??? Ok, that's not a fish bowl, it's a coffee bowl (don't ask). Anyway my point being sometimes it feels as if I live in this bowl and all of the Japanese people stroll by and peek into the bowl and observe me and my life. I repeat, "sometimes" it feels that way, not all of the time. There are days when I float around and do my thing and I don't mind the extra attention. In fact it's pretty amusing and who doesn't like attention. However there are times when you have private matters that you don't want to be everyone's business. You just wish you could cover up that bowl and hide from the prying Japanese curiosity. Being here a year, I've gotten use to the quirks of being a foreigner; being stared or oogled at, being spoken to in English even if it doesn't make any sense (man passed me on the street and said, "It's super"), asking my Japanese friends to help me with simple things that my poor language skills can't cope with (I now have many Japanese "mothers" my age. Help me Mom, oh I mean Emiko!), being asked my age, height, and weight almost weekly, etc...... (there's more, I'm just tired of typing them). Well today was a fish bowl day for Rich. He's tried twice now to deal with the national health insurance. I'm of little help with this because when I arrived, everything was already taken care of. When he went to the town hall to fill out the form, my supervisor stopped him and "tried" to help. His 30 minutes of trying turned into Rich trying not to strangle the man. My supervisor started asking 100 personal questions (fish bowl prying) about Rich's job, salary, etc. My supervisor doesn't even deal with health insurance. Rich ended up leaving the town hall without completing his task or speaking to the insurance department. This is the second time a Japanese man has tried to help Rich. The last time resulted in an easy flat tire fix turning into a completly broken bike that we can't use now. So tomorrow, our very dear and helpful bilingual friend, Masaya will be going with Rich (like a proud father) to the town hall to sign him up for insurance. It's a hard reality to be 30 years old and not able to deal with small issues in life. Very frustrating and very much a part of living in Japan.
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Functional illiteracy is how I like to put it. It's both a frustrating and humbling thought that a juvenile is more capable in this society than we are (in some respects...actually, many). Then again, were the situations reversed I'm sure many Japanese would fail miserably in America and Americans would be less inclined to "help" even if the help we receive here is sometimes choke inducing.
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Don Daza???? Is that you???? Long time, no see.
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