Talking Chinese Butterflies

It has been an extremely busy week for me this week. Well, busy for what my job normally consists of, anyway. (Interesting fact: considering I'm an English degree student I just learnt that the word "anywho" doesn't exist.) More so in the evenings however. I've found that there is a lot of out of work hours with this CIR job. I can use those hours to take the time off on other days, nonetheless.

On Tuesday, I went on my first "business trip". It made me feel rather special.
We went to Sapporo, what I like to call the "capital of Hokkaido prefecture". Our trip was on invitation of a Chinese film festival, where they are going to be showing a number of Chinese films this week in the cinema(s?) of Sapporo. They approached our city asking if we would sponsor them, which we did, and in return we got an advertisement of our town in their brochure and the invitation to their Opening ceremony, a free viewing of one of their films and attendance to their Reception party. All in all, it was basically trying to stabilise the perhaps unsteady bridge of friendship between Japan and China.

So there we sat. My Head of section and I, in our specially labelled cinema seats about 4 or 5 rows from the front, me cocking my head at the 3 or 4 important representatives from China giving their speeches in their native tongue, then nodding in understanding and admiration at the Chinese interpreter who translated in Japanese afterwards. It did appear that he had notes of their speech beforehand, but he did perfectly well at interpreting the improvised dialogue that popped up here and there. Contemplating I may be considering a future in a similar career path, I realise that I still have a long way to go.

A new Blog Blog?

I believe this would be my third attempt at creating and maintaining a Blog. Or perhaps my 5th or 6th, if you counted my angsty adolescence - hood diaries online or my teen fangirl rambles on LiveJournal.

I'm hoping this will be a longer project, seeing as Blogger seems to have updated itself rather fantastically with all its fancy widgets and gadgets. As it is now more customisable, I no longer have to go through the headache of coding my own Blog like I did back here, or update easily from my snazzy Japanese mobile phone but get fed up re-writing all the Japanese garble for each and every Blog entry. I've also missed not typing out an actual entry, rather than just "EATING CAKE, NOW, OMG" in the Twitter format I did for my previous Blog.
I'm actually scared that I've become quite illiterate. Considering the course I studied at University was 'English language and Literature', I ironically have a very low bank of vocabulary, and as I tend to revert to repeating the same words and phrases constantly, Thesaurus.com has become my best friend. I'm hoping that by beginning to write more, as pointless as these Blog entries may be, I can regain my English language-literature student pride. And I should read more. My god, I really should read. I can't remember the last time I finished a book.