It was made sure in today's class that Rab would get me a heart attack someday.
The psychological test we did today looked very familiar to me. Then I remembered doing the same thing in the selection test of Rotary Exchange Student. We were ordered to draw house, greens, the sun, human beings, path, and so on. Now I have some idea what they wanted to know from it. That is, the independency, maturity, flexibility, and things like that. We took a look at all the other students and had a good laugh. Some people had one huge house in the centre of the paper. Some had the massive sun taking half the paper, and.....snake. Ey no mention on that.
Language was one of the biggest problem I had when being abroad, especially jokes. Sometimes, or most of the times actually, it was not even funny to me when people say things like that I will not live so long in South Africa because Japan has the great number of people who commit suicide.
Whenever I speak a ward of English it was responded with a pouring rain of laugh because I kept swapping the pronunciation of R and L, which I cannot help due to the absence of R sound in the Japanese. I did not dare say that I bet they can never pronounce biyoin and byoin correctly apart when they cannot even pronounce my name. Instead they called me Saki, Sahyka, or Sake. They thought Sake （酒）represents Japan so well. That is much better than being called Sushi so I did not complain.
More, they do not talk,or like to talk, about blood types but racism. Just like some people do not understand why not many Japanese have valid religious belief, I do not understand why they always describe people in colour. Let's say I told a friend of mine 'I met this one girl who talks a lot and is loud' she/he would reply 'Is she black?'. Once there was a time my host brother asked me 'which group of people will you be with, black or white' then I said 'Why must I choose just one side?' he looked shocked while I was pretty much shocked with his question.
It might be the inheritance of Apartheid. It is still fresh in people's memory that there was distinctive ditch among races in South Africa. They used to make jokes on other races that they thought were really funny at that time but that is not considered so at present.
I was even scared to speak English at least the first 6 months so I would list language as one biggest issue I encountered during my exchange year.
Really interesting post!
ReplyDeleteI usually don't read others' posts, but this time I read all in spite of being long!