Last day of March (for the Cafe, one more day to go in "real life"!), and hopefully last day of winter - we had a layer of snow this morning - an amazing 0.1 cm was covering my bike, my roof, my garden table etc!!
A fairly quiet Tuesday with Jade from Spain, Laura from a Latin place, and Cassandra from Greece. Oh yes, and me, from Kobe, Japan!
All I remember is that we had "serious" talks. I don't really remember about what though, as it's already 22:51 now - the Cafe finished about 7 hours ago! I'm going to share with you why it took me so long to get blogging: German chancellor Merkel visited Turkey to talk about various topics with Turkish boss Tayyip Erdogan, among them the extremely delicate matter of Turkey joining the E.U or not. After that, I got totally hooked on reading all the people's comments & opinions. I couldn't stop reading, as I'm curious about what Germans think and feel. There - I broke my new year's resolution once again!
Today we discussed the differences about the "Western" & the Japanese attitude concerning priorities in life. And to make a long story short, Japan:
1) Company
2) Family
3) No idea!
Germany:
1) Family
2) Company (maybe!)
3) No idea (probably holidays - the more, the longer, the better!)
This topic led to an amazing story ("recited" by Laura) about a Japanese man who did 単身赴任 for 30 years, got himself a lover (naturally, I don't blame him at all), and got locked out of his own house by his "devil wife" after returning home following retirement! Of course, "devil wife" took all his retirement money before that!
By the way, I found two funny interpretations for 単身赴任&単身赴任者 : commuter marriage / a business bachelor
I found those quite witty!
Today we studied part II of our British/American "dictionary":
And enjoyed this delicious banana cake:
Well, this is it (NOT MJ related!)
Hope to see many of you in April, and that it'll get warmer soon,
The "Master"
