More about Iida dialect. I've been told いっといな corresponds to, in standard Japanese, いってらっしゃい - what you say in response to someone announcing they're leaving with 行って来ます. That's both totally believable and totally inconsistent with how I've had people use it on me -- maybe that's one of a few different valid uses of いっといな. Or maybe I'm on something. Who knows. I'm no linguist.

Not to turn this blog into Kids Say The Darnedest Things: Study Abroad Edition, but there are these two kids staying with the host family until the end of the week -- my host parents' grandchildren. There's a girl, four years old, and a boy, two years old. I forgot to mention this, but listening to how really young kids who only recently learned how to converse form their sentences is pretty interesting. You'd think it might prove useful for the prospective Japanese speaker... well, maybe it would for one a little brighter than me, I suppose. But anyway, we were around the dinner table watching the Olympics and the dog -- only about five months old now, so he's still small -- was running around, going crazy and annoying everybody. So the girl picked him up in her arms, turned to me and said ｢ポケモンゲットだぜ！」, "Pokemon getto da ze!"

If you don't get it, I'm sorry, I'm not explaining it to you -- I do enough damage to my studly alpha-male image without going out of my way to tarnish it as it is. But I did get a good laugh out of that.

Speaking of the kids, I had to take them to the shrine out by our house this morning. Now it wasn't exactly that I didn't want to do this, I was just kind of nervous bringing someone else's kids to some religious establishment I'm not really too familiar with (not that I could really possibly outdo the people who walked into one of those do-not-enter protection shrines way up in the mountains I suppose) and looking after them. I figured I was going to screw up.

So I didn't screw up, but let me tell you, you seriously have not experienced "awkward" until you're looking after two children who speak a language you're not exactly 100% on and they start fighting and crying and screaming right by a hundred-foot-long set of menacing-looking stone stairs. The best I could really manage was a feeble "hey, stop it, you two!" a few times before I decided to just pry them off of each other.

Well, it worked out somehow. I guess even if I spoke mega-fluent Japanese, there's usually not much reasoning with rampaging toddlers, huh?

Twice now in the past week I've gotten on the train and heard my name from some conversation circle consisting of random people I've never met. That's a little unnerving; I've heard rumors get around like crazy in Japan, but I wasn't expecting strangers to have me (or the other exchange student here, who conveniently has the same name as me) at a disadvantage. I suspect I have our celebrity status at the karaoke place to blame for this.

We move to the next town, Hikone, in I think nine days. I'm going to be living in a dormitory there with tons of other English speakers... the only problem I have with Iida is there aren't many college-age kids around here, so while I have a lot of friends I don't have many in the traditional hang out, do things together sense of the word. It's actually kind of hard to practice conversational Japanese, although I can read and write about umpteen billion kanji now and my listening comprehension is up to "can understand everything but toothless old ladies and the news." Even so, I'm worried I won't be able to find as immersive a Japanese-language environment as in Iida if I'm living with a bunch of other Americans... maybe I should apply for a homestay after all.