Something to amuse you as you hear how fully incompetent I am at communicating in my own country. I am bowing right, left and centre, then being embarrased that I've just bowed so bowing more in apology/embarrassment, my head nodding up and down like one of those annoying dogs that sit on the car dashboard...it's starting to look like I'm half way between having a seizure and starting a break dance or something as my bows get continuouly deeper and force my nose closer to the floor...I might learn break dancing so that I can just start styling it out into that - I think that would look more natural!
I have just come back from Vienna on holiday (I used to live in Vienna, it's amazing) - I went and asked a lady in the airport which U-Bahn line my desti-station (I've just made that word - why don't we have that word?) was on, in German - it was no problem when I prepared myself slightly, she answered, but I, unfortunately hadn't prepared myself to respond, and even the simplest "Danke" seemed to escape me, and I opted for athe next best thing: a big bow and an "arigatou gozaimasu" in the middle of Schwechat airport in Vienna...how was I supposed to explain that? "Oh sorry, that was Japanese, I'm not Japanese though, obviously, but I used to live in Japan, but you can hear I'm also not Austrian, I'm British, but I'm here on holiday and I can speak German because I used to live here and studied it at uni"...then how would she respond having just felt that she'd watched an episode of "This Is Your Life with sushi-less" and we'd both missed our trains. So, instead, I sort of yelped and leapt back at the same time and ran to the ticket machine, leaving a very confused Austrian in my still semi-bowing shadow...NOT GOOD.
I've become so used to getting it wrong and embarrassing myself, my new tactic is to just say nothing in reply to people, which is incredibly rude, but at least it saves me looking like I'm one of those chronically shy people that is on their first day out of the house in two years. It's so weird, because I seem almost fine when I'm with my mates, but the second I'm amongst actual general public, who have no idea that I've just been living in Japan for two years, I start getting everything wrong and looking like a crazy person!! Typical! One thing that I haven't got out of the habit of, even with my friends, is gesturing everything...this is not from my experience of talking in Japanese in Japan, but of speaking English to a bunch of kids who understood very little of what I said, meaning that I got into the habit (which I apparently can't shake) of gesturing everything possible, which means doing a little pencil gesture when I say "write", making a little book with my hands when I say "book" or "read" and pointing at people when I say "you". This means that I am treating my fully native English speaking 2o-something friends, as if they are 5-year-old Japanese children with no grasp of the English language. One such gesture is that every time I say "me" or "I", I point at myself....unfortunately in Japan you point at your nose not your chest when you say "watashi" (true story), so I keep pointing at my nose at the dinner table...beautiful. I'm also counting with my fingers in the Japanese way, which is getting a bit ridiculous now and getting many strange stares. You should be able to see them below: this is how a Japanese person gestures when you counting, and this is now how I now gesture when I count...to people who don't need a gesture as they fully understand the words 1-10 of course. My worst gesture faux-pas so far was yesterday, when I shook my finger (wagged it, you know, like a patronising head teacher) at the girl in the chippy (fish and chip shop) when she asked me if I wanted salt and vinegar on my chips. She looked horrified, which I can understand - it was very sort of..."no little girl, of COURSE I don't want salt and vinegar." Must think harder next time...that or tie my hands behind my back when outside of the house.
Of course, I wish I could say that my problems here in the UK stem from the fact that I am an example of perfection in my communication style in Japan...not so. I recall not long from the end of my stay in Japan that in ONE DAY I managed to not contradict a man when he said his granddaughter was a bit slow, and instead agree, fall asleep in the waiting room at the dentist's, wear my special dentist surgery's slipper onto the MINISCULE piece of carpet situtated at the bit where you put your feet when you sit on the leany-backy-dentisty chair, put there surely only to catch out the gaijin, over-confident in outdoor shoe-indoor shoe-slipper-toilet slipper-bare foot CHAOS that is Japan's complicated shoe system...why that TINY piece of carpet just there that you had to be bare foot on...WHY?? And also I was in the school's announcement system room and managed to play some music on the loud broadcast outside the school when I thought it was only playing in the little room I was in...bit of the Norwegian Eurovision entry for the kids outside on the PE field. That was all in one day too!
So, what I am telling you is that I left Europe 2 years ago a fully competent member of British society and, I think, Austrian society, to being some kind of half-way-house, not fully competent anywhere and not to be trusted alone in public at any time...I might get myself a sign to go round my neck saying "WARNING: just been living in a strange country, high risk of social awkwardness and head nodding," or maybe I'll just give in and buy myself a Dunce's hat...embrace my new-found incompetence!
