Welcome back to Wales….
We’ve arrived, and I’ve managed to get hold of an internet connection for now… in the office ;)

Just to keep my link back to Japan though, found some new blogs which I’ll be reading.
First up, we have JapanNewbie, which has some pretty interesting Japanese language tuition on Kansai-ben (the Kansai dialect of Japanese from the area around Osaka and Kyoto). There was a story of particular interest, titled “Skinny Girls”. When you come to Japan, you always notice (compared to the UK in my case), how most people are slim and in good shape (some you notice more than others, ahemm ;) :) …. [ouch!!! virtual slap from Yuko there] ). There are of course a few chubbier people, and the school kids seem to have a higher proportion of chubby people (though, not usually obese). During my time here, it feels like already that the kids have been getting chubbier too. Too many damn McDonalds.
So, that story on skinny girls was quite a shock to me. Japan has a huge percentage of underweight girls compared to it’s GDP…. as the graph shows. That’s just crazy!

The other new site I’ve found is Gaijin on the Run. There was quite an interesting post on the actual count of kanji characters in Japanese, around about 50,000. Yet… to read a newspaper, to be considered literate, you only need to be able to read 2000 characters, 4%! Yep, it’s a strange concept indeed being considered literate when you can only read 4%. Anyway, the full post on that is here.

Anyway, we are now moved into the house we’ve got for about 6 months, before we sort out more long-term housing. We are living right on the northern edge of Cardiff, and we can see the country side about 10-15 minutes walk away…. our place is in the middle of a very green (well, green and brown given it’s winter) housing area. Yuko told her folks that we are living in the country. To her, these suburbs are very countryside-ish to her. She’s happy though… Sainsbury is only 10 minutes walk away!
Just got things to sort out now, switching electricity supplier, sorting out new mobile phone number etc etc. Joy!