02 March, 2009

Weekly Round Up - is it really March already?!

Been a week since i finished my meds. I haven't noticed any physical changes, but mentally i feel a lot stronger & happier. It's weird (but i guess perfectly natural) but coming off the meds was alike a bog door closing on a particularly hard period. Kind of like the sun coming out after a long cloudy period.
I guess physically too things have changed, but it may take longer for these changes to become apparent. But, yeah, things are good.

Last Saturday, i attended a house-warming party at Sarah & Keisuke's place. Was a wonderful evening, with lots of lovely lovely people - most of whom were new to me. I don't think i have been at a party with so many British people. Well, i guess i have in Britain, but not here in Japan.
And, seeing as i spent Friday evening at Lala's and watched several episodes of Inspector Morse, it was a very English weekend...

In the last week or so, a lot of people have asked me about the move to Germany. The usual question is something along the lines of "Are you excited about moving to Germany?"
When you are asked the same question a lot of times, you start thinking more about it & of different ways to answer.
And as a result, i have thought a lot my answer & came the realisation that i am NOT looking forward to Germany. And i am not excited about Germany.
Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-Germany or Germans and I am very excited about moving.
But the truth is that i am excited about being with the German & starting a new life together with him.
Germany - the country - does not excite me. It happens to be the country where my man is from. Germany has never been somewhere that i thought about in concrete terms. And if i am honest, i don't have any feelings about Germany either way (positive or negative).
Some friends have said that i must be excited about being closer to my family. And while i love my family, i haven't lived in the same continent as them since i was 19; so have got used to being far away. For me, it'll be strange to be in the same continent.

Some things about Germany do fill me with apprehension though. The main thing is the language. Every German speaker i have met keeps reinforcing the fact that German is bloody difficult. So while the pronunciation is relatively easy, the grammar is a complete bitch. Also, i realised that in Japan i'm obviously a foreigner. Japanese people don't expect me to understand anything; so are pleasantly surprised when i do speak Japanese. In Germany, i will be an invisible foreigner and things will the opposite. I really don't know how i feel about that.
I just know that i have to learn German. I need to be able to function on my own & not have to rely on people around me to do that.
The one very small plus is that i have learned German before. I even have a GCSE in it (grade B, so i can't have been completely crap); on the other hand all i can remember is "ich habe vielefische" and "I have a have a lot of fish" isn't really going to get me very far....