So many interesting items on the news feeds today. Nothing major, much of it local, somehow all of it particularly interesting to me. Madoff, for one. I know someone who knows Elie Wiesel's family. So sad. John Stewart tearing apart Jim Cramer: an elegant rebuke. The Stranger finally reviewed Oddfellows and I can weigh in on the clueless service. Thieves stripping cars in my neighborhood.

I saw Cherry Blossoms (Hanami) tonight with friends Chris and Nadine, whom I know through chado and who were part of the group that went to Kyoto three years ago. The film is German with subtitles. When the setting shifted to Japan halfway through, suddenly I could understand the dialogue. Places and social processes made sense, the food looked familiar. But then, for the hell of it, I tried to compose sentences in Japanese in my head and found them tangled with the small bit of Korean that I learned so well and occasionally a French word or two. Sometimes when I'm trying to construct a phrase in Japanese, I can't tell if the word I've thought of is Japanese or Korean they are so enmeshed in my mind. I want to continue to study Japanese but it is one of many things I want to do, and I want to try new things too. One of those new things is to go to places I've never been and don't know anything about. Like Germany.

It was strange to have these two cultures juxtaposed in a film, the very foreign place I know so well and have been to many times and the more familiar place that is foreign and that I'm about to visit for the first time.