It may or may not be obvious, but I’m a bit of an attention whore.

I loves me an audience.

This will become apparent.

We had calligraphy class after our normal lessons today. Obviously, with only an hour to do it, it was less of a class and more of a “let’s have the foreigners mess around with paint.”

I wasn’t very good at it.

The guy I was sitting next to was AMAZING, he’s Korean and apparently he’s been doing calligraphy since he was a very small child.

Obviously, sitting next to him, my first-timer chicken scratches weren’t going to measure up.

Worse yet, since he was so good, he had a constant stream of people coming by to look at his calligraphy. Since they were coming to our table, and didn’t want to seem rude, they of course would look at whatever I was writing and say “jouzu desu ne” before they got on to the real reason they’d come over.

“Jouzu desu ne” is Japanese for “wow, you can tie your shoelaces all by yourself?”

Well, basically.

So I was feeling kinda dumb.

On the other hand, I had the advantage in one critical area: He, and most of my other classmates, were busting out the “love” and “dreams” and “spirit” and “dragon” kanji, and I took a bit of a different approach.

Below: 老人 (“geezer”) and 禿 (bald). While I’m certainly not winning any contests of skill, I did get a lot of Serious Japanese People to bust out laughing.

And that’s what it’s all about. 🙂