Proficient?

A picture from my birthday party that Krystal threw for me... and yes I was a bit intoxicated.


Krystal doing what she does best, cutting the cheese...cake.

I’m trying to be a good blogger now… so what’s up dudes and dudettes? This past weekend went by really quick and I have no idea what happnened. Well I know what happened but I can’t believe its already over. Yes that can only mean that today is Monday. Well I’ll start on Friday an bring you up to speed.

Friday night me and my friend Kevin had an enkai. (Another work/school/teacher party.). This is the school that I usually go with even though they’re not my school this year. I think it had been a good 6 months or so since the last time I saw everyone and everyone seemed to be in good spirits. They were still the same bunch of teacher that accused each other of being gay or perverted., just like usual. This time we went to a Chinese restaurant and it wasn’t all that bad. Especially when the night’s theme is to drink as much as you can, food is not always everyone’s top priority. So we drank to our hearts content for two hours only to move to another a bar to drink some more. The funniest part of the evening was this long winded discussion I had with one of the teachers.

Let me start from the beginning. First of allthe dude was wearing a shirt that had a cat “doing” a turtle from the back. I found it highly inappropriate for a teacher to wear, nevertheless it was funny. I was raging his taste in clothes when he made a crack about how crappy my aloha shirts were. I don’t claim to be an expert but I did live in Hawaii fro 24 years and I have owned many aloha shirts so, 24 years experience in purchasing and wearing aloha shirts would make me a somewhat expert right? Right… anyway he claimed that he had 4 aloha shirts that were so cool that I couldn’t wear them. So I asked him to describe to me what the shirts looked like and he described on of his shirts as being a pink silk shirt with a tiger on it. WHAT THE HELL?? That’s not an Aloha shirt! So I tried to explain to him that the shirts he had were nto aloha shirt. This is where he got semi-offended and became really defensive saying that*
a) Each shirt was about 150 dollars
b) Each shirt had a collar (?)
c) And that each shirt was made of silk.
d) And they had tigers and dragons on them
e) And they had buttons made out of walnuts

Like I said earlier I’m no expert but I don’t think those are aloha shirts. I tried to explain to him that an ALOHA shirt is a collared shirt that had buttons but then the main part is that the picture on the Aloha Shirt should give somewhat of an “island feeling, paradise, vacation, or the Aloha spirit.” There are in fact some Aloha shirts that may have dragons or tigers on them but in a way that describes paradise or the islands. So he got really pissed and tried to explain to me that his shirts were Aloha shirts because they were made by a designer that is popular in Japan… etc. I was really drunk during this discussion as well as my teacher but he never could accept the fact that he might not have any Aloha shirts and that indeed all he made were loud shirts. So he tells me that he is for certain that I would LOVE the shirts that he owned but never in a hundred years would he give them to me. And that’s how the drunkenness went on.

So of course on Saturday I slept in. And by sleeping in I really slept in. I think I woke up around 1:30 or so. It was too cold to do anything outside so me and Krysatl decided to stay indoors all day. We watched some TV and had some really good polish sausage omelets. That night we decided that we better open the Japanese books and study. You see the next day Sunday we had our Japanese proficiency test. There are four levels of the test and depending on what level you’re in you take a certain level just to say, “I am proficient in Japanese according to this test I took and passed with a 60%”. We’ve been taking Japanese lesson to better our conversational skills but somewhere done the line we decided that we should make it official by taking the test. BAD IDEA. The studying didn’t last too long but our brains were too mushy to continue.

So on Sunday we woke up at the butt crack of dawn to go to the testing center and take a language proficiency test. How did we do?　I'm sure that Krystal did fine, knowing that she speaks Japanese but I did horribly.　I totally bombed it. It was such a crappy feeling. The feeling that you recognize everything but nothing was for sure. The whole test was like that. All you need is a 60% to pass but I don’t even think I did that much. Hopefully my guessing skills were still sharp after being unused since my UH days. At least the test is over with and I don’t have to worry about it anymore. I’m more interested in speaking Japanese and understanding rather than knowing grammar points. I actually felt pretty good during the listening section of the test since I could basically understand everything that was being said. That was the easy part, you can throw kanji and grammar out the window though. It’s finally over…..

Well I guess that’s what happens for waiting until the day before to study for the test. And now it’s Monday. Another whole week until I get to sleep in…. goddamn its cold….