Daily Life; Social Aspects

November 6, 2011

Win and Giovanni

Chef of Giro Giro

Our social world is different than at home, but has become quite charming in its way.  At work, unless I go downstairs to the department office to get a new battery for the clock, or am in class with my students, I'm by myself in my spacious office.  I like it.  I often go to the student cafeteria for lunch.  In Japan I haven't any of the feeling I have sometimes in the US of being "alone in a crowd".  There is a way in which the presence of others on the street and in the cafeteria makes one feel accompanied, though also left alone.  Japanese students often eat lunch by themselves, much more so than one would see in an American college cafeteria.  They don't seem to need "conversation" to feel connected, the way we often do.

Through my Friday class in beginners' Japanese, we've become part of a little "gang" of foreigners.  There is Emilie, a 30-something, quite brilliant biology post-doc from France, Giovanni, an Italian, also in his 30's and a post-doc in math, and Emmanuel, a french historian of psychiatry, also in his late 30's, who is hoping to get a tenure track job in Germany and may be leaving in January.  Emilie is married to another biologist, and Giovanni has a girlfriend, a pediatric neurologist, who will join him for a few weeks in January.  Emmanuel seems unattached. There is also an Italian visiting professor whose field is agricultural machinery, and another Frenchman,  Nicolas (not in our beginner's class), who works as a French teacher and has a Japanese wife who works in the field of "luxury tourism".   We haven't met her yet.

Together we go to lunch on Fridays, and have attended an opening of a photography show at the French Cultural Institute.  We have been to two "hole in the wall" music clubs on Saturday nights. We had a splendid dinner together at a very famous, but hard-to-get-into local kaiseki restaurant (Giro Giro).  The food would be a good subject for a later blog post, except that food is better fun to eat than to read about.  And usually we eat at home.

I could go on, but won't for now.


Love to everyone.......