Day 19

So today after church I ate the ￥150 church lunch (きつね udon, yay!) with Hanako, one of the youngish girls. She works at an insurance company. Our conversation was 97% in Japanese. I told her that I studied music in college, and she invited me to come to the church gospel choir practice later that day. So I stepped out of my comfort zone and went.

There's always those awkward times when I want to say stuff, but if I'm limiting myself to Japanese, nothing readily comes to mind, so I have to sit there and compose in my head or think of things I know how to say in my head, creating awkward gaps in the conversation. And then we talk about lame stuff: our majors, how many brothers and sisters we have, our hometowns, etc. At the gospel choir practice, everyone was nice and talked to me slowly and even in English a little bit, but I still felt way less confident today than I did at last week's lunch. I was messing up left and right, I made stupid mistakes and corrected myself, I couldn't hear anything and had to ask people to repeat so many times, and I felt like I was accidentally rude a couple times by my language choice. But they're all so nice. Genuinely nice and caring. It's just in their blood to be nice to people, to make themselves liked, save face and keep the peace. If they felt annoyed by my presence at all, it sure didn't show. Rather the opposite: they would tell me how good I was. I wanted to be like, HAHA, I hope you don't really believe that, and are just saying that, because if you think MY level is good, try hearing every single other non-Japanese person in JSA, people who've actually studied for 4 or more years unlike my 1.5 years. So I struggled to get by, and there were a couple comical misunderstandings, the funniest being when someone said "ガスペル" (gospel) and I thought she said "hospital," but overall I feel positive that I tried. And I'm more motivated to study now. :)

The actual singing part was kinda boring, not to be elitist or anything, but what made it fun was that we were all singing together, and I got to sight-read Japanese lyrics to songs. Rie-chan was super nice and wrote out all the furigana for me so I could pronounce the kanji I didn't know. To my great disappointment, there was no sheet music, only word-sheets, but I stood in the alto section and just caught on by copying the person next to me. It's actually really, really easy. Even while syllabically reading hiragana. But since it's gospel, it was very chesty and belty, and NO girl in that room (myself included) could belt, so it sounded kinda funny to try and here everyone belt. Since I'm so used to regular choir, I didn't like it, I couldn't be as loud as I wanted to because my belty chest-voice isn't very developed, and my voice was tired at the end which means I was using bad technique. Also it was boring because there were only two girl parts so there were like 6 or more people on a part, and only one tenor and one bass there haha. But overall I am so happy that I went, I love experiencing CHORAL MUSIC in a different country (one that uses fixed Do!?) and I'm excited to come back next week.


Food Miscellany--My 4th time going grocery shopping today.
-The ice cubes are really big here. It's kind of a deterrent to me chewing ice all the time.
-My cheaper-and-probably-healthier desserts: frozen banana, frozen tiny jelly cups, half a grapefruit
-Pasta sauce here is comparatively expensive, so I made my own: I bought stewed tomatoes and eggplant, and we already had basil and garlic at home. And get this: it tastes better than regular tomato sauce.
-Some things I want to try in the future: crêpes, baked pastas like lasagna, doing more things with tofu
-I want to start being more...exploratory...at the grocery store. And go to other stores besides S-mart, which is the only store I've gone to so far, but there are lots of other stores and open markets around! I just don't even know what's good/what's cheap and don't know who to ask.


Oh and BTW the rain was CUH-RAZY again today too. It was ザアザア(zaa zaa) rain which means SUPER HEAVY POUNDING RAIN. The church is literally 2 minutes from our house, but we were walking foot-deep in water the whole time and the umbrella did almost nothing, so my skirt and hair were pretty wet the whole time I was sitting in church. -_-