Soba and studies...

Tokyo is undoubtedly an expensive city, but when you know where to go, you can live quite cheaply. I feel sure it's less expensive than Dublin, at least.

This was my dinner after work this evening. So yummy and only 500 yen (about 4 euro). You can't go wrong - you have your buckwheat noodles, your soup, at least 6 different types of vegetable, and your tofu and egg for protein.

It's from my favourite little soba shop near Tokyo station; a very unassuming little place tucked away in the back streets. You'd easily walk by it and, even though I've been there tonnes of times myself, I always get a little bit lost trying to find it. The rewards? You always get a seat, soft lighting, and some laid-back jazz.

I can't remember if I told you or not, but my course started back up there in the middle of January. Ah, the joys of further education. I thought nothing would ever be as difficult as the interpreting module, but now we've moved on to sight translation. This is where they give you a document, but no pen, or paper, or dictionary and you have to tell them exactly what's written on the sheet. And I mean exactly - if you try to replace a hard word with a simpler one or to skip a seemingly superfluous bit, they'll make you go back and start again. The reasoning behind this is that in a contract negotiation, for example, every dot of an 'i' and cross of a 't' can be important.

To this end, I have a kanji test tomorrow. Now, I actually really like kanji (the Chinese characters used in the Japanese language) and quite enjoy studying them. But I've just not had a free minute this week. In the last module, I was pretty good about handing in all my assignments and keeping my notes in order, but this term is looking a lot more rough around the edges.

It's a new teacher, and she's a bit of a chatter, so I always try to get a bit of natter going at the start to minimize the amount of lesson time. But that won't fly tomorrow as it'll be straight down to the test. I guess I should go off and do a bit of work, eh?