In Kyoto

Hi everyone! Hope you:re all well! I:m fine, I just ate as good a pain au chocolat as you:d ever find in Paris :)

Well　I have a lot to say (this is my diary as well as my way to keep in touch) and this japanese keyboard is very hard to figure out... forgive me if my punctuation is shocking... and apostrophes are in different places so I will use : instead!... and it keeps trying to convert my text into Japanese characters!

So, I'm here in Kyoto... flights were okay, apart from feeling wretched on them... It was a long day on Wed, started at 7am and arrived at my ryokan at around midnight. The weather:s actually very mild - it was 21 degrees when I arrived at 8:30pm... Got thru immigration without being asked anything, not even :how are you:

I have actually been using　Japanese a LOT, mostly because I have no choice. I hate to think what I must sound like to everyone. I learned a little Japanese over the last few months (and thank goodness I did, but I never practised speaking it much and so I have a lot of words I haven:t properly mastered. Examples:

saying 'I came from Australia in the meal' instead of 'in the morning'! (When trying to remember morning I tried asa gohan which means breakfast - asa is morning, gohan is meal, but I said the wrong one...)

saying 'hairdryer ga imasu ka?' (means 'is there a hairdryer' except you are supposed to use imasu for animate objects - people, animals etc - and arimasu for inanimate objects - places, items. So she probably had a mental image of a sentient hairdryer...)

trying to say that I had done a lot of walking but I think I said that there were a lot of people walking...

Anyway, I:m pretty dreadful but grateful for what I do know, because it:s coming in very useful. And it:s good I have this time travelling before I have to work, cos I can focus on practising japanese, looking up phrases and looking up kana (Japanese characters; I:m still learning the main ones).

Better post this and then post another, I don:t want to lose my text, it:s taking me much longer than normal to type as all the punctuation keys are in the wrong place... also for some reason all of Blogger is in Japanese and I don:t know how to change it.