And mario…

Hi everyone,

I had a pretty interesting cross cultural experience a few days ago. My little host brother, rei, got the new Mario game for the DS a little while ago and we have been playing it together when Yu says it's ok. I still have a lot of trouble understanding rai. A lot of my Japanese it pretty formal while his is the typical, 6 year old stream of consciousness. So a lot of the time the most I can do it ask him simple questions which can be really frustrating. I want to say, "jump up on the block to the right and while running, jump over that pit. Careful for the jumping fish." But ya…. I don't think so. So ultimately we just pass the DS back and forth and he jumps around on the bed when I beat a level. It actually really reminds me of when Sarah Bickal was my babysitter and we would sit around the TV and play Mario on our old NES. I remember thinking she was a god at Mario and now the situation has kinda reversed. Very weird.

Anyways the point of this is that with all the trouble I have with communicating with rei and everyone else in general, I has a really cool experience while walking from rai's grandparents to our house to play Mario. I started singing the Mario theme song and he piped up right along with me. "du du du dudud udu dududu duduududu." it was really… refreshing I guess; to not have that language barrier there for once when communicating with someone. Even if the only communication was singing the theme song to a game.