Baka gaijin returns

As I was requested, this is the sequence of the short funny stories series...

• When I first looked at my house address I just thought "How can someone find the place based on this information?". The Japanese address system is confusing, especially in places with lots of small streets connecting with the main ones in an irregular way, to the point that some places look like a maze (like the place where I live, where is not very simple to specify a block) or they use strange sequences for the numbers, like buildings are numbered according to the order they were built... My doubts were cleared a little when I noticed that usually police officers, post offices, etc. have GPS or electronic handbooks who tell the location of a place based on the address...



• Sometimes I look at somebody around and mistake him/her for a Brazilian friend... some really did look alike, especially from afar. Now sometimes it just happen that I mistake some of my Japanese friends sometimes... (of course, usually I realize the mistake before calling or something like...)



• Giving presents to Japanese... When I gave a Brazilian T-shirt I was asked what was a "G" written on the label. By impulse, I simply answered "G size, of course!"... Then I realised that "of course" he'd ask that! Here the large size is given by "L"... (Information: in Brazil, "large" is "grande"... that's the reason to use "G".) My bad.



• Well, I wonder what's my real Japanese level... I usually can keep a conversation with my Japanese friends in Japanese. Although I know they're being very kind with my mistakes, in the end they can understand what I say... I hope. But when I have to talk to some company employee, especially by phone, I'm lost... That's mainly because of the Japanese polite language that I don't understand well. For example, one day somebody from the laundry called me. She was trying to tell me something about one of my clothes I sent there but couldn't get it, so I just said that it was ok and to ignore the problem (whatever it was). When I recieved it back the lady explained me that the problem was about a piece of the zipper that fell out... (By the way, it was loose a long time ago.)



• Still about Japanese language politeness. There're also different kinds of polite language, used when you talk to someone "superior" or "inferior" than yourself (in hierarchy, of course). So, when talking with teachers, for example, they usually use informal language and I'm supposed to use formal language (because a student would be inferior than a teacher... of course one may be allowed to use informal language after becoming closer). But I'm used to reply at the same level of formality as I listen, because that's the way I do in Brazil. Then I've been in many situations like talking informally to a teacher I first met or trying to use the "super-formal language" that attendants use (considering the customer "superior" than themselves) when talking to one...



• So, in 2005 there was a governor election. Watching the advertisements (by the way, ads about the election... there's not political propaganda on TV like in Brazil, thankfully), one thing that seemed strange was a word always present that I couldn't understand the meaning. A word that I was reading as wagoto (和事), but checking the dictionary it was written that the word was something related to kabuki. Ok... then what an election has related to kabuki??? Asking (one of) our Japanese teacher(s), she said that the word we were reading was actually chiji (知事), which means "governor"... Ouch! Big kanji mistake!