The note, along with contact details for an “E. Patschke” and an “R. Müller”, reads as follows:

Ed-Media/Ed-Telecom ‘98

June 20-25

http://www.aace.org/conf/edmedia/default.htm

15,68 pro Stunde

I started working on a master’s degree in Freiburg in 1996. Two years later, I was still flitting from subject to subject, not knowing what I really wanted to study or why I really wanted to study it. I was also looking for a student job that was slightly more fulfilling than my previous attempts at making money, i.e., working in a flower shop (horrible and really tough) and working in a jewelry shop (mind-numbingly boring).

I vividly remember standing in KG IV (the building which housed the history department at the University of Freiburg), looking at the notice boards and seeing the announcement for the Ed-Media/Ed-Telecom conference. The computer science department which was hosting the international event was looking for students to work the registration desk and guide the attendees from one venue to another during the conference. Applicants needed to have the equivalent of an undergraduate degree, “good manners” and a knowledge of English, and they needed to be reliable and know their way around Freiburg.

This described me fairly well, so I plucked up the courage to contact E. Patschke and go along to the first organizational meeting. I got the job and wound up working at the conference registration desk, which was rather stressful but also quite a buzz. The oddest experience I had was helping out an American couple whose travel agent had booked them a hotel room not in Freiburg im Breisgau, where we were, but rather in Freiberg, Saxony—a good 650 kilometers away. It was pushing on towards evening, the couple didn’t speak a word of German, and they were both exhausted and desperate after driving around town for an hour looking for a hotel that didn’t exist. After several phone calls, I finally managed to get them a last-minute room nearby, and their gratitude buoyed me throughout the rest of the hectic day.

I guess I proved to be a good little worker during the conference, because when it was all over, the computer science department asked me if I wanted a permanent student job with them; most of their articles for journals and whatnot had to be written in English, so they needed a proofreader. I happily obliged and started making regular treks out to the department, red pen and style guide in hand. Eventually they gave me translation work in addition to the proofreading, and I started doing more and more translation jobs for people outside the university as well, and suddenly everything snapped into focus and I realized I really wanted to be a full-time translator.

I scribbled down two other job leads alongside the conference job on that day back in 1998: one was from a journalism student looking for someone to proofread her essays and help her with English speaking and comprehension, and one was from another student needing written English help. I wonder now what would have happened if I’d chickened out on the conference job and contacted one of the two students instead. Maybe I would have gone down the English-teaching route for a while, but I think I still would have wound up getting into translation; I’m much more of a flicking-quietly-through-the-dictionary person than a standing-in-front-of-a-class person.

I’ve spent all the intervening years flicking through dictionaries on a full-time basis, and as I’ve done so, I’ve often thought fondly of the people in the computer science department and how they kind of gave me my “big break” without any of us even realizing it. And it’s funny to still have this artifact, this little note I scrawled in the university hallway over 11 years ago, marking the moment when my life took one path and not another.

NB: “E. Patschke” turned out to be Elisabeth Patschke, an administrative assistant who still works for the computer science department, and “R. Müller” was Rainer Müller, a lovely IT chap who, several years later, wrote a reference for me to get into the linguistics program at the University of Sussex. The Ed-Media conference still takes place every year; this year it’s being held in Honolulu. And the only reason I’ve hung onto that scrap of notepaper is because there’s a fish recipe from my friend Schorsch on the other side.

As usual, I’m excited about the conference. The majority of Brighton’s geek community appears to be attending this year, which will be fun, and we’ll also have a rare opportunity to see our Australian friends. There are some interesting-sounding panels, an overwhelming number of parties, and the promise of tasty, tasty BBQ and steaks as big as your head, all washed down with a frosty Shiner Bock.

And yet, I can’t shake the memory of last year’s somewhat difficult SxSW, when I was sick in bed for the first half of the conference, too wiped out for the second half to enjoy things with abandon, underwhelmed by a lot of the panels, and completely fed up with being jostled and deafened at all the social events. I’m counting on not getting “SouthByScurvy” this year, but even robust health probably won’t make all the overcrowded parties any more tolerable. I’m just hoping for more of what made last year pleasurable (when it was pleasurable): quiet lunches and dinners with friends. I’m also hoping that the one panel I really don’t want to miss lives up to expectations: Nom Nom Nom: The Secrets of Successful Foodblogging.

Which leads me to this: As you may have noticed, things have been painfully quiet here on Wordridden lately. I’ve come up with some possible reasons for this. The first is that, like many long-time bloggers, I’m finding that, for better or worse, sites like Twitter and Flickr are fulfilling my desire for online self-expression. It’s certainly a different kind of expression than what’s possible here on WordRidden; a 140-character Twitter blurb can’t compare to a 1,400 word essay. But even a good two years ago, I wrote that “being online is as much about keeping in (ambient) contact with people as it is about having an outlet for my thoughts […] so maintaining an online presence seems to have taken precedence over personal expression for me.” I can’t say a lot has changed since then.

But there is a caveat: While I feel less of an urge to write long, detailed blog posts about every blessed thing I’m doing or thinking, I have developed more of an urge to write long, detailed blog posts about something else—namely, food. The most inspired I’ve been about WordRidden lately was back in July of 2008 when I signed up for NaBloPoMo again because the theme was food. Principia Gastronomica also came out of hibernation at the end of last year, and though I’m only managing about one post a month so far, I’ve got lots more ideas lined up, and I’m getting a lot of satisfaction out of exploring this culinary passion of mine and finding out that I can inspire others with it as well.

I’m not sure where it will all lead, but I’ve definitely been feeling a “disturbance in the Force” lately, like something is changing, like maybe it’s time to take these two long-standing passions of mine—food and writing—and turn them into more than just a casual hobby. I don’t quite know how to go about it, but I’ve got a stack of Principia Gastronomica business cards and an urge to poke my nose into that cubby hole labeled “Food Writer” and see what’s going on in there. I’m certainly not giving up the day job—or the personal blog—just yet, but for the time being, you may be more likely to find me over on Principia Gastronomica writing about the minutiae of mustard than here writing about the minutiae of my non-foodie life. We shall see.

We generally go out for a nice meal on our anniversary, but this year we really didn’t know what we wanted to do. We didn’t have the burning desire to check out a particular restaurant in Brighton, and we couldn’t come up with something special to cook at home, so we just kept going back and forth—“What do you wanna do?” “I dunno, what do you wanna do?”—until it looked like we wouldn’t do anything because we just couldn’t decide.

Then last night, Jeremy asked, “If you could have anything at all, what type of food would you want?” I, predictably, said “Italian” and admitted that I’d been having a craving for some good Mediterranean cuisine lately: mozzarella, Parma ham, figs, fresh pasta…

Jeremy said that, for our anniversary, we should splash out on something with truffles, like we had in Bologna several years ago. I said I didn’t know where you could buy truffles. Jeremy said Italy. I laughed and (jokingly!) said, “Oh, should we fly to Bologna to buy some truffles?” Jeremy said, “Yeah, why not?” And aside from the fact that I had ordered a veg box which would be showing up before the weekend, I really couldn’t think of a reason why not.

And with that, Jeremy got his laptop, fired up lastminute.com, and booked us a flight and two nights in a hotel in Bologna for the weekend.

Jeremy, my love, even after nine years of marriage, you never cease to amaze me. Thank you, and happy anniversary!

The edamame toy display was set up around a television showing several brief animated films featuring various speaking legumes. I wound up standing next to it for a bit while we waited for our friends to finish shopping, and though I was only half paying attention to it, the little theme tune insinuated itself into my brain, where it remained firmly lodged for days afterwards.

Several days later I was in a department store, and lo, they also had the edamame toy display with the animated films and catchy little theme tune. This time I really watched the animations to find out what they were all about, and…well, I think I got brainwashed, because from then on, I was completely obsessed with the talking edamame thing.

Jeremy can attest to the fact that I subsequently spent (ahem) a rather long time researching the talking beans online. Just a month ago, there wasn’t a lot of English information about them to be found, so I had to painstakingly piece together what little info I could find with what little Japanese I could understand.

What I discovered was that the beans are called Mameshiba (or “bean dogs”), and they are apparently characters in some new anime show. In the animated shorts, when the bean, pea or peanut pops out of its shell, it dispenses “one-a-day bean factoids” like: “Did you know that millions of bacteria live in a kangaroo’s pouch?” Why this makes people turn grey and shadowy as if they’re having an existential crisis I do not know. What I do know is that the bean-dogs’ sweet little voices and big shiny eyes in combination with the dramatic music and the humans’ obvious distress at being spoken to by their food makes for one seriously weird cartoon. Which I absolutely love.

The first time was just about a year ago. Spurred on partially by Jeremy and partially by the National Blood Service TV ads (god, that music—I was welling up just listening to it on the website), I finally overcame my complacency and trundled down to Hove Town Hall to donate a pint.

I admit, I was a bit nervous. I’m not particularly squeamish about needles or blood, but I don’t especially like to be jabbed and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the whole procedure. As it turned out, it was absolutely fine; all the “donor carers” were gentle and reassuring, and frankly, they make you feel like a bit of hero for being willing to donate at all. Plus, you get tea and biscuits afterwards—yay!

Between going to Thailand in February and then traveling back and forth to the States throughout the year, Jeremy and I couldn’t donate again until this month (because of the risk of malaria from Thailand and West Nile virus from the States). But yesterday, after a fortifying lunch at E-Kagen, we headed over to the donation session for our second round of bloodletting.

After it was over, Jeremy said that the whole thing had restored his faith in humanity, and while it may sound funny, I have to agree. You see an entire cross-section of the population at these donation sessions; yesterday there was a big guy with tattoos (which he must have gotten a long time ago or else he couldn’t have donated), a kid in a hoodie, older men and women, people who had clearly just nipped out from the office, a hip couple in their 20s… It was a little snapshot of Brighton, and I wondered what had prompted each person to come and donate. Whatever the reason, the important thing was that they were there, voluntarily giving a part of themselves to help someone else.

If you can donate blood and you don’t faint at the sight of a needle, I would really encourage you to do it. You’ll feel good about yourself, you’ll feel good about your fellow citizens, and you’ll be saving someone’s life.

In many ways, Japan was exactly like I expected (and hoped) it would be. I got to see cyberpunk landscapes and eat tons of delicious food and see loads of amazing fake food and speak some Japanese and ride bullet trains and stay in a traditional inn and experience the beauty of Kyoto in the autumn and the craziness of Osaka and the unimaginable vastness of Tokyo.

But Japan did surprise me in one key way: it felt much less alien to me than I thought it would. For all its apparent other-ness—and for all that I, as a tall blonde, stuck out like a sore thumb—Japan felt oddly comfortable to me. Jeremy agreed that the weirdest thing about Japan was how not weird it was, and we both said that we could quite easily imagine living there (okay, I say that about every place I visit and fall in love with, from Sydney, Australia to Sitka, Alaska—but for Jeremy to say that is really rather remarkable).

This may be in part because it reminded us both quite a lot of Germany, with its cleanliness and orderliness, its feeling of security, and with the formality that governs day-to-day interactions with others. The blinding neon landscapes and blaring pachinko parlors are deceptive, I think; they give an impression of chaos where very little chaos exists. It feels completely chaotic as you try to navigate gigantic Shinjuku station or the teeming streets of Shibuya, but at the same time it feels like there’s a method to the madness, and as someone who doesn’t deal particularly well with uncertainty or chaos, I liked that a lot.

I also liked (nay, loved) the fact that you could stroll the streets at night and not encounter people getting into fights/shouting at the top of their lungs/upchucking kebabs on the sidewalk/vandalizing cars and bikes/generally being wankers. Even the seediest little alleyway we wandered down in “edgy” Osaka felt safer and more civilized than any street in Brighton on a Saturday night. It was very heartening to be reminded that there are places in the world where people can have a good night out and not feel compelled to break something afterwards.

There were other pleasant surprises, too: I have never, ever seen such spotlessly clean hotel rooms in all my life, I’ve never had even the simplest of foods presented with such attention to detail, and I’ve never had so many people call out greetings to me as I walked through a store (Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase! - actually, that got to be a bit much after a while).

I was also very pleased to find that the minimal Japanese I managed to learn before going really came in handy, because there sure wasn’t a whole lot of English around. It’s perfectly possible to get by without speaking or reading any Japanese, of course, but just knowing hiragana and katakana and being able to figure out what were ramen shops and what were yakitori joints, for example, made me feel a lot more confident. Plus, it was great fun trying to work things out—and sometimes even succeeding.

Between Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, I think Jeremy and I got to experience a nice slice of urban Japanese living. Tokyo offered all the neon canyons and noodle bars you could want, but there were also surprisingly peaceful places to be found, like the forested walk to the Meiji Shrine, or even the top floor of the Takashimaya department store in the middle of Shinjuku, where you could escape from the hordes and enjoy a cup of coffee on a little rooftop terrace. We got a brief taste of Akihabara and its manga madness, we got to do a spot of karaoke, and we got in a lot of people-watching at the Starbucks overlooking Shibuya crossing. And we even managed to get up at the crack of dawn to visit the absolutely massive Tsukiji fish market and then dine on a big sushi breakfast.

Kyoto was a welcome respite from bustling Tokyo. It’s not that Kyoto wasn’t bustling itself; the streets were thronged with shoppers and the tourist sites were thronged with visitors enjoying the fall colors. But the pace and atmosphere were still different. With its traditional buildings, serene wooded hills and women shopping in kimonos—not to mention the occasional glimpse of a geisha—Kyoto has a much more stately air about it. It’s also a stunningly beautiful city, and one of my most treasured memories from the entire trip to Japan is of the lantern-lit alleyways and temples of Kyoto at dusk, which are simply magical (one of my least favorite parts of the trip was wandering around those alleyways in the heat for 45 minutes with a splitting headache while we tried to find our inn—but it was all worth it once we were settled in our room overlooking a tiny Japanese garden, with some traditional Kyoto sweets and a pot of hot green tea to soothe us).

I loved Kyoto so much that I was a bit worried when we left to spend a few days in Osaka; despite the lure of good food, I wondered if we were making a mistake giving up gorgeous Kyoto for gritty Osaka. I shouldn’t have fretted: Osaka was awesome. The entertainment district is like all of the bright wackiness of Tokyo compressed into a single street—and if any place I saw in Japan reminded me of Blade Runner, Osaka did. We did head out of Osaka during the day for a quick trip to quiet Nara, with its giant wooden temples and pushy deer, but we spent our evenings on gaudy Dotonbori, eating street food and looking out for men with missing fingers (we never did see any).

We spent our last night back in Tokyo with new and old friends, drinking at the J-Pop Café and dining on yummy fried things on sticks. Jeremy and I had also treated ourselves to a big room at the swanky Cerulean Tower hotel in Shibuya, and as we sipped early-evening cocktails there and looked down on the glittering Tokyo skyline from 35 floors up, I had a sudden feeling of utter conviction that I would be visiting again some day. And I fully intend to learn more Japanese and do just that.

Finally, I have to say thank you, thank you, thank you to John Allsopp and the rest of the Web Directions East team (Satoshi, Akane…) for making this trip possible in the first place and then going way above and beyond the call of duty in making sure everyone (including me, who was just along for the ride) was happy, comfortable and very well fed—and thank you to Oli for the wonderful company and great meal in Osaka—and to Jon for taking us to Yakitori Alley—and to the other WDE speakers for being so much fun to hang out and sing karaoke with—and to Jeremy, my partner in exploring Japan’s highways and byways, its finest hotels and tiniest bars, its craziest sights and its endless culinary delights.

Domo arigato gozaimasu!

It seemed particularly fitting to me that he should write about language today of all days, as I find myself on the eve of our long-awaited trip to Japan. Yes, in just over 12 hours, Jeremy and I will board a flight bound for Tokyo, and I’ll get to see just how far all those hours of podcasted Japanese lessons will get me.

I’ve been really, really enjoying the whole process of learning Japanese; it’s not something I ever thought I would do or could do, but now that I have started doing it, I really don’t want to stop. I hope that I can maintain the motivation to keep learning even after our trip to Japan is over. It’ll be tough—I’m not terribly self-motivated when it comes to most things—but having gotten off to such a good start with the language, it would seem like a pity to let it all slide.

Anyway, those are thoughts for the future. My thoughts for right now are 1) packing, 2) sleeping and 3) not missing my plane tomorrow. So for now: sayonara!

Jeremy has been asked to speak at Web Directions East in Tokyo in November, and it goes without saying that I’m going to tag along because…dude, it’s Japan!

I’ve wanted to go to Japan for a looong time—probably ever since I first picked up a William Gibson book. When the prospect of Web Directions East arose several months ago, I tried not to think about it too much because I knew I would be massively disappointed if it fell through. But several months on, the conference is set, the plane tickets are (almost) booked, the travel plans have (almost) been made, and I can now officially be excited.

I tend to view traveling to a new country as an opportunity to dabble in a new language. I always like to know a few words of the local language, partly because I hate the helpless feeling of not being able to communicate properly, but mostly because I’m just a word nerd who gets off on knowing how to say “thank you” in Tlingit or “that was delicious” in Thai. So naturally, as soon as I found out the Japan trip was on, I decided I had to learn a bit of Japanese so I wouldn’t feel completely and utterly lost when we arrived in Tokyo.

It’s fair to say that I knew next to nothing about Japanese a few short months ago. The first thing I learned is that written Japanese uses 3 (three) alphabets, or rather, two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana, each with 46 basic symbols) and one set of characters known as kanji, of which there are, oh, about 50,000. But only around 2,000 of those characters are used really frequently.

Uh, yeah. So much for being able to read the street signs then.

I haven’t let this knowledge scare me off, though. Fully aware that I have no chance in hell of learning any significant amount of Japanese in the short time available to me before the trip, I have nonetheless embarked on some intensive self-study in the hopes of maybe being able to at least work out some menu items when I’m in Japan (culinary exploration being, as always, a key aspect of this trip).

I’m making use of a few programs recommended to me by Relly, namely, JapanesePod101.com and the Michel Thomas Japanese foundation course. I’ve also got notebooks scattered around the house so I can practice writing hiragana and katakana while I’m at home (I didn’t intend to learn how to write the characters, but writing them helps me remember them), and I’ve got some kana and kanji apps on my iPod for practicing while I’m on the go.

And amazingly, after several weeks of sporadic study, some of it actually seems to be sticking. My first revelatory moment came a few weeks ago: On his last trip to San Francisco, Jeremy brought me back some little sushi stickers, some of which have Japanese writing on them. I had no idea what the writing said—or even what characters it was written in—when he first gave the stickers to me. The stickers sat by my computer for ages, and every once in while I’d look at them and giggle, because little sushi stickers are quite funny. And then one day, after I had started coming to terms with hiragana, I idly picked up the stickers—and lo, I could read what they said! It was like in a movie, when gibberish symbols suddenly morph into letters and words. Unagi! Uni! Maguro! (It helped that the writing happened to be the names of types of sushi, which was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of Japanese.)

That small victory spurred me on to keep at it, and since then I’ve been making a concerted effort to study a bit every day. I walk around the house talking to myself in what little Japanese I now know (“I like it, therefore I will buy it.” “Yes, I will drink a beer.” “I drink coffee every day, but I do not eat sushi every day.” ). I pore over pictures of Japan, attempting to read the signs on the shops. I find myself transfixed by the packaging in Asian food stores. And I go to bed every night with Japanese words and thoughts of Japan swirling around in my mind.

I think it’s all driving me a bit mad—not to mention poor Jeremy, who has to put up with me shouting “Soba!” and “Yakitori!” at him every time I work out what’s written on one of those red lanterns. But it’s rather thrilling as well. It’s been a long time since I tried to learn a brand-new language from scratch, and I’ve never immersed myself in a language like this on my own. It’s tough, but it’s so incredibly satisfying when all the little linguistic pieces start coming together, and you start seeing the patterns and connections, and you start understanding the syntax and morphology, and…okay, yes, I’m a language dork. But it’s like code-breaking: you chip away at it and chip away at it, and when you finally crack it, the sense of achievement is fantastic.

Whether any of this will be of any practical use to me once we’re in Japan remains to be seen. But for now, it’s just brilliant fun!