你好 (Ni hao)

Watching "The Last Samurai" made me realize that I have a penchant for languages. This is a bit relevant for today's theme. I will talk a little about our exchange program yesterday at Ookura village in Yamagata Prefecture.

I was chosen to present a 10-minute slideshow presentation to the children of Ookura village. I had been notified about a month ago but my cramming instinct didn't fail me again to make me work on my slideshow overnight on the night before the actual day of the exchange program. I had been worrying about using the school's computer installed with Microsoft Powerpoint but as I still had no enought data and picture files until last Friday, I just settled myself in thinking that I would just use my computer at home with Open Office installed on my Linux platform.

I tried the slideshow editing software but found it too difficult to use. I regreted that I didn't prepared early enough to make it on Friday but luckily, I checked out Open Office's website and found out that they'd just released a new version. I downloaded it and installed in in my Windows platform hoping that this last choice would be able to buy me some time for me to sleep. To my astonishment, Open Office Impress (OO's version of Powerpoint) was so easy to use and almost made me forget that it was not Powerpoint that I was using.

I was able to work on my slideshow smoothly and that enabled me to add more topics and enhance the layout of my presentation. To cut the long story short, I finished at around 5:45 am, leaving me with barely 45 minutes to close my eyes and feel the warmth of my think blanket against the almost freezing autumn dawn of Yamagata.

Ookura village is quite far from Yamagata City. I thought it would be around 60 minutes by car but in reality it had been one and a half hour. Along the way I was so worried of getting car sick besides the known fact that I had no enough sleep. Luckily, I neither felt dizzy nor sleepy during the long journey.

My presentation went well though I wasn't really fulfilled as the time limit was so short and I had put so much information on my presentation. Anyway, after everyone had their presentation, a Taiwanese professor had a game where he taught everyone simple greetings and expressions in Chinese. Here are what I learned:

謝謝 (谢谢 in Simple Chinese) - This is "Thank You" in Chinese, "Arigato" in Japanese. It is pronounced as "Sheshe". The character itself means "thanks".
不氣起 (不气起 in Simple Chinese) - This is "You're welcome." in Chinese, "Doitashimashite" in Japanese. It is pronounced slightly like "Bukechi". As I understand, the three characters literaly mean, "not minding what happened", exactly "Walang anuman" in Tagalog.
早安 - This is "Good morning." in Chinese, "Ohayo" in Japanese. It is pronounced as "Sao an". The first character means "early". The next one means "safety".
晩安 - This is "Good evening." in Chinese, "Kombanwa" in Japanese. It is pronounced as "Wan an". Some of you may recall that one of my favorite Mandarin songs is Vic Zhou's "Wen Rou De Wan An" (A Gentle Good Night). The two characters mean "night" and "safety", respectively.
你好 - This is the well-known "Hello." in Chinese, the counterpart of "O genki desu ka?" in Japanese. It is pronounced as "Ni haw". Literally means "you, well?"

I also showed off to one of my Korean schoolmates but letting her hear some of the Korean words that I learned from "Stairways to Heaven". Yesterday was a day full of fun and words from different countries.