It is almost summer here, hot in the morning when I walk along the riverside to the school. Earthworms, lost on the tarred street, are baked to dark, purple something which look like the squids I get served sometimes for breakfast. Yes, there are moments I miss a delicious smazeny syr and an accompanying cesky pivo. Meanwhile I can speak and read a little bit Japanese, for example "ogenki deska" means "jak se mas" (how are you), it is not so difficult, up to now an easier grammar as Czech, but a lot of things to memorise, all these strange symbols. The Japanese has two different written phonetic scripts, hiragana and katakana, and the Chinese characters, kanji. The basic vocabulary is written in kanji. The difficulty is, that each kanji has more than one pronunciation. The kanji as a single character has a proper meaning but , as for example "one", a single bar "--", is spoken "hito", or in a kanji compound as "January", looks somehow like "-- #", is spoken "ichi gatsu", the first month. But you never know if a written kanji compound in the text is a real compound or just an alignment of two single characters, so I, as a beginner, have to learn each pronunciation for each word. A simplification, compared to Chinese, is, that the Japanese language uses hiragana for writing inflections and particles. Hiragana is something like an extended alphabet, there are the letters a, i, u, e, o and its syllables like ka, ki, ku, ke, ko, ha, hi, hu, he, ho and so on, altogether 46 characters. By the way, ra, ri, ru, re, ro is pronounced more like la, li, lu, le, lo, but it depends about the words. So loanwords, mostly from the English, are sometimes hardly to figure out. They are simple to recognise, because they are written in katakana. These are the same syllables as hiragana but different characters, 46 additional ones. As an example "shirt" transforms to "shatsu", or "soccer" to "sakkaa". (Here a useful phrase to start a discussion with a Japanese about the coming football world championship at Korea and Japan: "watashiwa sokkaaga ichiban suki desu.", that means "I'd like football most."). English, French, and Italian, written in Roman letters, is often used, like English is used in Europe, but with more grammatical and contextual errors, as a sample this recommendation in front of a drugstore: ... A new selective condom. (Hope my English and French skills do not degenerate to much in the coming months.) Anyway I need a lot of imagination. There is no distinction between singular or plural, or nouns can also be used as adjectives and so on. Therefore in communication the context is quiet important and subtleties can change a lot. Perhaps I made and still make a lot of mistakes and at the beginning here I had a bad feeling therefore but that is because I read some useless guidelines before arriving in Japan. It is a highly structured society as far as I can estimate. Apparent, when considering the school system. In addition to the obligatory school uniform every pupil carries a tag with name and function. Accordingly in an enterprise. And depending on the function the behaviour changes. But a foreigner resides beyond the system. Meanwhile I do not care too much about this hierarchy. Being polite and humble, what else, are good manners to come around. The people are very kind and in general I got an answer or assistance when necessary, in the other case, when I am too eerie, they just ignored me. This irritates me, it is as irritating as when I shake hands for goodbye and the other person does not get in eye contact. It is not so easy to remain objective and not to proof all the prejudices. The reorientation in a different society was and is primary posing questions about myself, and I do not really like them. Anyway I am, and will always be, a stranger here or why do a mother stop her car to let her girl waving her hands when I crossed them on my bicycle, or why greets me a grandma in the morning with a brightly face? (This, a first impression, mainly about the language, but that occupies me most. I would really have some better language skills. How can I learn Japanese when I have already problem with German? Luckily Japanese has also a semantic, otherwise communication would be impossible, so, as an engineer, I am not completely lost and do my best to structure and to trim the language until I catch the sense. Next circular will be in Japanese ;).