Served at the wedding reception, these remained untouched in the Hungarian sections.

Seeing this statue of John Paul II in Poznań, I couldn’t help but think that this is not the usual papal pose of giving a sermon or the likes, but that this pope looks like he’s about to say: “And I wanna get loaded, and I wanna have a good time. Thats what I’m gonna do… I’m gonna have a good time, I’m gonna have a party.”

Maybe there is some truth to that t-shirt “I like the pope, the pope smokes dope.”

(akogare) Means something like “longing for something you don’t or can’t have”.  It’s what I’m reminded of on the rare occasion I see someone wearing a t-shirt in Japanese.

Yes, I reckon I could go months at a time without seeing a single character of Japanese emblazoned prominently on an article of clothing.  You know how silly American college kids get tattoos of kanji characters, hoping to instill their bodies with a bit of that Asian je nais se quoi, the assumed depth that comes with not being able to read something from a highly objectified culture?  That happens here too, but with English, and a 99% saturation rate.  Yes, America and Japan both have this 憧れ phenomenon, kind of like Boston and Nanking have both had massacres.

Yea, and you noticed that pretentious touch of French there?  Imagine if I used phrases like that twice or three times a sentence and you’ll know what the announcements at a 100-yen store sound like.  あなたの大切なマイホームとマイカーをリフォームしよう！ファストサービスでスムーズなフィニッシュ！レッツショッピンッグ。(anata no taisetsu na maihoomu to maikaa wo rifoomu shiyou! fasuto saabisu de sumuuzu na finisshu! rettsu shopping.)

Now that may not all be 100% canon Engrish, but it’s not all that far off either.  If you want, try to pick out all the loanwords in that linguistic scrapheap.

Good to see they keep you in mind as well.

east, unless you’re writing a book about Japan, in which case it’s “Japan”.

I honestly don’t understand it.  Well-traveled, culturally informed people who’d never in a million emperors’ reigns confuse “Dutch” with “Deutsch” suddenly smash all of Europe and the Americas together for the sake of having something to compare Japan with that adequately shows just how different it is.

It’s another world culture, not antimatter.  There’s no objective reason to call green tea and chamomile opposites rather than two varieties of tea.  Bowing is not the opposite of shaking hands any more than ball point pen is the opposite of gel-tip pen.  And stop pretending you know what everyone speaking a Romance or Germanic language (or whatever branch houses Hungarian and Finnish) does or that they’d all be equally surprised to find people taking off their shoes when they enter the house.

In general, stop comparing Japan with groups so huge the only conclusion possible is that Japan is different from everyone else. You may not realize it but people here have been listening to that kind of description of, and constructing a concept of, their country and ethnicity for the last 150 years, the end result of which is that people have exactly the same unrefined notions as Meiji-era Americans had about how weird and unique and impossible to fathom their country and culture of birth are.  I’m not saying all, but a lot of what defines “Japan” and “Japaneseness” to Japanese people is basically backwashed Orientalism.  And you don’t help by disengaging your 21st century, post-nationalist brain whenever Japan enters the discussion.

I won’t even pretend to know what’s going on over here. My sister thought it looked like bodies going into a dog house. Being a historian, the idea of a crematorium came to mind. Being in Poland, those kinds of crematoriums came to mind.

It was part of some open air art exhibition in a central square in Poznań, but this was the only work that left me feeling a little creeped out. I can’t say what it’s actually supposed to be, as all the accompanying information was in Polish, and as I’ve said earlier, I don’t know Polish.

It could of course be a visual representation of the Ethiopian origin myth, in that God made clay figures, put them into an oven, and that’s how he made man, but somehow I doubt that’s the case.

My knowledge of the Polish language is absolutely nonexistent beyond the most useful phrase “na zdrowie,” which you say when you toast with drinks, hence its importance. As such, I have absolutely no idea what the advertisement above, in a toilet stall no less, is actually saying.

Maybe it means that the two different forms of rubbers are actually interchangeable?  I don’t know, although I’m guessing you could hold papers together with a condom if you needed to, and given enough rubber bands pulled tight enough, you could use it as a form of contraception. Then it would be ribbed for her pleasure, although definitely not for the guy.

This link has been making the rounds of late; and as a superbly qualified expert commentator, what with a blog even, I feel obliged to pitch in my 2.1 yen (approx. 2 cents) and help drive information inflation a bit further.

My students tell me stories of public school experience 20 years ago where teachers would openly and haphazardly enact corporal punishment, with nothing to fear but having to waste a few minutes listening to the wan apologies of the parents after they discovered bruises on their child’s torso and knew decorum demanded they show remorse for his/her alleged poor behavior. Compared to this bit of imperious pecking-order brutality, the thought of the shoe being so completely on the other foot and in side splits way the hell away from each other offers at least a second of “they fuckin’ deserve it” relief. However, much like the employee/employer relationship, wherein one shows absolute sedan-chair-hoisting obeisance and the other can order his (yes, most likely his) subordinates to do unpaid overtime just as a test of loyalty and conformity, having the shoe on the other foot is a poor substitute for having 2 well-balanced shoes.

No one, except perhaps public school teachers, wants teachers to be mere IMPs of the school system anymore. No one except the parents, and here I mean each individual parent wishing this for him/herself and no one else, wants parents to be dastardly Perilisks who can fell teachers with only a threatening SQUINT. GrWolf parents would be ideal – tough enough to be threatening in bunches but not a game-ender. You just want teachers to think twice before doing something careless and shortsighted, not make something they have to do unnecessarily and arbitrarily difficult.

Those last 2 sentences were a reference to walking off the beaten path in the Temple of Fiends and Gurgu’s Volcano.

As our train pulled into Poznań Główny train station, this is what we saw. I’m not sure what this means, but it’s an interesting thing to see upon arriving in any city. Except Amsterdam, since it’s expected there.

I spent about 1.5 weeks in the UK and a long weekend in Poland for a wedding recently, so the upcoming random pictures and stuff will probably hop around between those two, and occasionally Hungary as well.

Teach everyone starting from the age of 5 that it’s impossible to learn anything correctly without the instruction of a superior, and you’ll end up with the stupidest educated class imaginable.

For those of you not suitably cynical to Confucian thinking yet, “superior” here doesn’t mean “better” but “has some form of official certificate and/or is older.” And actually, yes, “stupid” means both “not curious about the world or capable of dealing with new concepts” as well as “knows few facts”. People might know more English vocab than Webster himself the day before the test, but give them a few years and you’re left with highly credentialed individuals who don’t remember anything of value and don’t have the will to learn anything on their own.