Okay by me in America

So, last night, I finally was forced to do presentation on America/Oregon that I was literally booked to do AT LEAST four months ago. Crazy Japanese people. For those of you who don’t remember every minute detail of my life (how dare you!), I had to give a presentation for 60-90 minutes in Japanese about home to whoever showed up at the Yabuzuka naninaninani place. Like, learning/meeting place. I dunno what you’d call it in English.

Needless to say, I choreographed an elaborate song and dance number in which I did my best Chita Rivera impression and argued the merits of America with a bunch of strapping young Puerto Rican men. Or I made a Powerpoint presentation. Either one. Anyway, I made a slideshow with pics of Oregon/various trips around America (NYC, Grand Canyon, SF, etc.), my high school, U of O, etc. to show various aspects of life in America. However, that is all of the preparation I did for it….I believe it may have shown ;)

I went there last night hoping that the only people there would be those I knew were coming (Jenny (bless her heart, and also, kawaisou), Nacchan, and Atsuko), but like 15 people showed up?! Surprising…I’m not exactly sure why they came! Of course, just like in the States, the only people to show up to free things put on by the town were all over the age of 70, hee hee. Oh, except for one of my shougakkou kids, who I feared may commit suicide out of pure boredom during the presentation. There are some tense issues in that sentence, but I can’t fix them. Deal with my broken English, muahahaha!

Anyway. Um. Oh, yeah, presentation. So, the pictures took about a half hour, and then I took questions from the audience about whatever. I guess it went pretty well? It was hard to talk about in Japanese because I haven’t talked about anything deep or complicated in Japanese for a long time. Regular conversations don’t compare to “Well, in Japan, you only have entrance exams to college (I don’t even know if that is correct), but in America, it is a combination of SAT scores, your grades, and activities outside of school. Even with those, it is possible you won’t be able to get into the school that you want to. It all just depends,” and so forth. Needless to say, many of my sentences ended halfway through! Hee hee. I also was scared (with good reason) because ojiichan and obaachan’s Japanese is hard to fucking understand! Even young Japanese people can’t understand what the hell they’re saying! I did pretty well, but totally didn’t understand one question. Oops! :) But I guess it went fine, who knows!

In the end it lasted about 70 minutes….I wanted to hang around and talk to people (or at least to my friends), but my ride (a guy from the kouminkan) literally had his car outside the door, ready to pick me up about TEN SECONDS after the speech was done. You would have thought he had planted bombs in the place set to explode at 8:42, he was in such a hurry to get the hell outta there.

It was worth doing, tho, if only because afterwards Nacchan and Atsuko stopped by with a gift of wine, chips, chocolate, crackers, and Coke for me! Awwww, how sweet! It was a “gokuorousama” present. Yay!