A family away from home

Introducing my adopted family: the Tsuji from Ise. I am going to stay with them for four days over New Year to get a glimpse of traditional life and hopefully, pick up some Japanese too. Ise is two-hours south-west of Nagoya, home to the most sacred Shinto shrine in the whole country, though apart from recommending the shrine, my Lonely Planet describes Ise as being ‘drab’. Still, Lonely Planet has been known to be wrong so I do hope that this is a case of Kanchanuburi, Thailand, where Matt and I had a great time but which did not come very highly recommended.

My new family is fairly young, husband and wife are 36 and 37 respectively, and the son is 3. He is so cute! I’ll probably spend most of my time trying to converse with the boy, since he can speak more Japanese than I can, and so he would be able to teach me a thing or two. We've established the other day that my Japanese is at the level of a one year-old because I could just about understand a conversation between mother and child in the hospital’s waiting room. It’s a sad fact but Tom Cruise speaks much better Japanese too. We were watching The Last Samurai last night and I was all smug at first because Tom was just learning the word for chopsticks and things like that, which I already know. Then, he was coming out with all these long, complicated sentences with perfect pronunciation and I could no longer keep up. I shudder in the shame of it all.