The Nine Lives – Ian Cheung, Information Architect in Osaka, Japan

開いた口が塞がらない

This is a Japanese expression meaning “jaw-dropping”. Which is how I felt when I asked a small Japanese language school if I could come down and talk to someone and look at the texts etc. I told them that I would only take up maybe 20 minutes of their time at most and that since I would be starting a full-time job in September I needed to take a lot of lessons as soon as I could. The guy on the phone told me that the earliest he could see me was in a week’s time! Normally I wouldn’t mention the name of the school but I feel that for students searching for schools the more information available the better. The school is called Ecclesia and is in Shoji, Osaka. If a potential student has to wait a week to see what the school is like then I have my doubts as to the flexibility of the school and how much they care about their students.

In the meantime, I signed up with the Osaka YWCA and am doing their Summer Intensive Japanese course. Great so far, apart from the difficulty of getting them to let me into the right level. But that’s a story for another time.