Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Minor Language Goof

So we're on our second of three legs of a train trip to Nagano right now.

On the third, we're going to meet up with my Aunt Hiroko, who's joining us from Osaka. She's mad for mountains and wants to come up to the Japanese Alps, where we'll hopefully see some snow and gorgeous mountain scenery - this was the site of the '98 Winter Olympics, after all. It snowed on Sunday, and there was supposed to have been a nice dusting today. Keep your fingers crossed!

In the meantime, the announcements on the train are hilarious. First, there's the standard stop, upcoming stops, and destination announcement in Japanese. It's then followed by an announcement in English, only the person saying it has a Spanish accent.

The conductor just stopped by to check our passes, and after looking at my mom's, he asked, "Matsumoto?"

My mom was starting to nod when I cut in and said, "No, it's Moriyama," correcting our Japanese family name.

Then I realized he was referring to our train's destination, where we'd change trains to Nagano.

I feel like an idiot.

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