Dangers of having a social life
I almost had my first life-endangering Christmas conflict today due to a confusion in my Christmas bookings. My private student had invited me over for Christmas dinner with her husband and a friend on Saturday. I said sure, since I wasn't doing anything much anyways. Then today I emailed a gender non-specific person and asked if they wanted to come over on Sunday. [Nichiyoubi ni, anata wa watashi no ie hoshi kimasuka?] (who knows if this is correct Japanese)
The response I got was: "Ehh!? Ehh!? Nichiyoubi!? Sun!? [at this point I realized I was in trouble] I was thinking that I can eat dinner with you tomorrow(Sat). You invited me to dinner when we went to the tower [Tokyo Tower], didn't you? [That was 3 weeks ago! Surely everybody knows that guys only have a 3 minute memory-we're like mice.]
Anyways, I had to frantically email my private student and ask if it wasn't too late or too inconvenient to switch the dinner party to Sunday night instead of Saturday night. Fortunately I didn't get in trouble for forgetting my promise. Because I wrote the original message in japanese, I was able to feign being an ignorant english person (which I actually am) rather than an ignorant person in general (which I might be) and just say that I accidently got the japanese Saturday (Douyobi) and Sunday (Nichiyoubi) confused.
All's well that ends well, as they say!
3 comments:
What's the point in having a fancy-schmancy Tintin daytimer if you can't even keep track of your once-every-three-weeks dates? You must have inherited some of my genes - I haven't used my daytimer since the second week of school. I guess some of us are not genetically programmed to be organized - on paper, or in your case in practice either!!
Hey I know where you're coming from, we're going days of the week/months and so on in Japanese class right now. And yes, it's kinda hard to keep track of it all, especially if you need to use a specific date or something right on the spot.
http://www.akagegaijin.com
hahaha. The great "ignorant gaijin" card.
(By the way this is Jordy's friend Matt. I run a blog about my life in Japan, Nagano-ken. Mine is the 私の話 link from Jordy's page. Sorry to hijack this spot! And its a pleasure to meet you, どうぞよろしくお願いいたします)
-Matt
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