Hugging cats

I don't know about all of you in Australia but there's only so many times a person can listen to Rihanna's 'Please Don't Stop The Music' before you're *BEGGING* her to stop the music...

On Monday a guy I knew from Australia came to Yokohama. He was travelling around Japan generally and decided to come down this way, so I was pretty chuffed to have my first visitor from home. We did the main harbour walk of Yokohama, which was about 4-5km walk from Sakuragicho station along the waterfront to Yamashita Park and then Motomachi.

He's quite a seasoned traveller, and his strategy for communicating here is just to speak English all the time. Actually that worked, most of the time. I have to say, if you don't speak much Japanese, it's probably better than doing what I do. I always speak Japanese, which means they usually speak Japanese back, which means I usually don't understand, but they think I do, etc... Actually, most Japanese people can produce a few words of English under pressure. :)

I mentioned I was missing animals and craving a pet to hug. Well, I got my wish in Yamashita Park. I saw these three:


I sat down so I could pat the grey one on the head. This is what happened instead:


The black one immediately ran to me and climbed into my lap. Before long both were in my lap. I got my fill of cat-hugging.

(Of course I washed my hands afterwards. And put the clothes in the wash. And took the coat to the dry cleaner's on the way home. But it was worth it.)

Actually I'm pretty chuffed. I went into the 'kuriningu-ya' (cleaning shop) for the first time and had a totally successful encounter - asked questions, how much for the coat, when will it be ready, is it okay if I pick it up on Wednesday morning, etc - *AND* understood the answers. Only a couple of months ago, I would have needed a phrase book to do this and would not have had the vocab to understand the answers...

Every time I have an 'unsuccessful' encounter and can't understand people in shops or restaurants, I feel stupid. Conversely, every time I have a 'successful' encounter and achieve some task in Japanese, I feel buoyant. :) Perhaps I should just start *every* encounter with 'nihongo ga sukoshi dekimasu...' so they go easy on me. :)