Tiny White Spinner

Wiggedy-whack, dear readers. Apologies for the continued lull in entries, but be warned, it'll get worse before it gets better. Monday the Twenty-Second at least, was eventful enough for me to make an entry of, so here goes! The day dawned with usual listening exercises, mostly taken from recent news stories. I often find these hard to follow, since news programmes often use specialist terms, though they become somewhat obvious when one sees how they're spelt (that doesn't happen in English too much, does it? "Oh, arsonist with an 'a'!"). Afterwards we were given an explanation of exams to come, and the reading material we'd be working on for this week - a short story entitled "Duke." It's about a young lady mourning her recently-departed dog, and then spoilers!

Tea ceremony was quite fun and laid-back, as always. At this stage in the term people appear to be quite comfortable with each other, so some may argue that laughing and joking with one's neighbor damages the solemnity of the ceremony, but since it was originally conceived in the spirit of enjoying tea, there's probably a little room for interpretation based on changing times. And we're only practising, after all; I'm sure we should have more self-restraint if we were having tiffin with the Emperor or some such. The pace is increasing now that we are more familiar with procedure, and we had two rounds of sweets this week - one kind had rainbow-like colours all in a lump, the other had texture and colours suggestive of a squashed slug. Tasted alright, but once the similarity had been pointed out to me it became a bit difficult to enjoy.

Classical Japanese was easier going this week - some grammar I vaguely knew about before but having it spelled out in more clear-cut rules helped to remember it better. Little by little we're delving into old texts more and some of the archaic vocabulary is starting to stick. I returned home feeling well with the world, and spent the evening working on an essay... but that's a story for another time.