Yuka
When Maria came back from Japan last week, she brough her friend Yuka with her. When Maria went to live in Japan several years ago, Yuka helped her get oriented and settled in Osaka. Now we’re returning the favor: Yuka is here for the summer to take English lessons at St. Joseph’s University, which is a few miles from our house.
Her original plan was to stay with us for just one weekend, and then move into a dorm. But when the time came to move into the dorm, she took one look it, and walked right back out. The rooms were absolutely filthy, even though they had allegedly just been cleaned. So she’s staying with us until she finds a short term rental (but since she can’t really speak English, Maria’s making the phone calls).
There’s no good way to get to St. Joe’s from our house via public transporation, and Yuka has an international driver’s license, so I’m letting her borrow my clunky old Nissan stick shift. But she had no real-world experience driving on the “wrong” side of the road, and she’d never dealt with a stick shift on the right-hand side, so we went for a driving lesson yesterday. She did really well - she even knew exactly what to do at a yellow light (floor it). The only thing she had trouble with was right turns: she kept wanting to go into the other lane. But she cured herself of that by the time we finished.
Learning English will take longer though. In trying to help her learn to speak it correctly, I’ve become conscious of just how peculiar our language is. For example, she was trying to say “I will pick you up at the airport,” but was having trouble with how to use “pick up.” It’s ok to say “I will pick up Maria” or “I will pick Maria up.” I think the latter might be technically incorrect (a split infinitive), but in conversation, when using a person’s name, you can put it on either side of “up.” But if you’re saying “you,” “him”, etc, then it has to go before “up” - saying “I will pick up you” doesn’t sound right. In helping her through her sentences, we ran into weird rules like that all the time.
She’s been treating us to some good Japanese cooking: so far she’s made sushi, Japanese curry, and Okonomiyaki. Yum!
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