It's interesting how quickly my Japanese skills return when I'm under duress. Case in point: I regained nearly all of my directional vocabulary shortly after getting lost in downtown Hikone. I spent a couple minutes in a cold sweat, wondering how long I was going to have to stumble around bleating 'Al Plaza! Al Plaza!' before I was able to get back to familiar territory. Fortunately, the first helpful person I stopped not only knew what I was looking for, but was able to give me directions in a simple set of right/left commands, allowing me to return to my home turf without further mishap.

Classes start tomorrow, which I'm looking forward to with some small amount of reserve. I think I tested into the proper level, but my last year of Japanese was a real struggle, so being faced with a high intensity course (basically, a year's worth of Japanese language instruction is going to get boiled down to the span of two months) is a rather intimidating prospect.

I'm going to need to do laundry soon. Problem being I don't have any detergent. Now, the smart person would go out and buy some, and fancying myself to be a smart person, that was one of the reasons why I headed out to Al Plaza today. Why did I not return completely lacking in detergent goodness? Well, you see my problem is that I have this thing about not buying anything that I can't read. The writing on the detergent bottles is mostly katakana, which I can puzzle out if given enough time, but I can never seem to get a quiet moment to myself to work it out. There are always sales people and other customers close by, and I really feel a bit too self conscious to stand around staring at a label for ten minutes. And I'm not about to make a repeat of the octopus incident, where I just grab what's closest and run. I'm willing to risk my stomach on a chance, but not my colored tidy whities. I don't want to accidentally grab a bottle of industrial bleach, and burn holes through all my indelicates. That would rank rather high on my list of 'highly inconvenient occurrences.'

Hrm. A day spent mostly inside and studying does not for lengthy journal entries make. Go figure.