the little things

Yesterday was Culture Day in Japan. It's one of many mid-week national holidays that I have come to love. Although it's nice that at home the random holidays are observed on Mondays so we can have 3-day weekends, I think I like the mid-week holidays better. They make the whole week more exciting, and the work week seems shorter. While riding my bike in the beautiful sunny, fall morning yesterday, I felt really excited and thought to myself that I was going to have an adventure. Then I chuckled as I realized that getting a haircut by myself for the first time is what I had just thought of as "an adventure". :D HA! Soo weird...but I really was excited. For more than a year I never went to a salon here. I just waited until I went home on breaks to get my hair cut. The thought of going to a Japanese stylist was not an option in my mind. They've rarely seen hair like mine, let alone cut it! Then, several months ago, for some reason my Japanese teacher, Yamamoto San (山本　さん), randomly suggested that I go to her stylist. She could barely stifle her laughter as she pled with me, "Pleease, Mya! It will be a good Japanese experience!" I knew it would be an experience, but I didn't think "good" belonged in that sentence. Finally my getting-too-long hair and Yamamoto San's persistence ("My stylist just moved back from Tokyo...he's probably done foreigners' hair before.", "He has good technique."...) made me cave. I agreed to go to the salon with her. I sat in the stylist's chair, nervous and barely able to breathe, even though before going I had looked up many words in the dictionary, drawn a diagram of what shape I did not want and what I did want, and explained all of it to Yamamoto San. The stylist seemed nervous too...'Oh great!' (Maybe it was because I looked panicked and wasn't breathing.) In the end, he did a good job, and I've been back since. But yesterday was the first time I made the appointment myself and went by myself without Yamamoto San there to help me explain what I wanted. It worked out well, and I really like my haircut...even though it is 2-3 inches shorter than I said I wanted! Adventure!

In the afternoon I was walking up to the train station and passed a man who directs traffic out of a busy parking garage. I greeted him with a single word, 「こんにちは」 / "konnichiwa", to which he enthusiastically replied, 「日本語上手いね!!」 / "Your Japanese is really good!!" No Culture Day in Japan would be complete without a Japanese person giving excessive praise for a foreigner's minimal language ability!