Expression

“Itte rasshai,” he said, right after we kissed.

“Itte kimasu,” I replied automatically.

A usual exercise in my Japanese for Beginners class was that the teacher would say a phrase or expression and all the students would give the response in unison.

‘Arigatou gozaimasu,’ she’d say. ‘Dou itashimashite,’ we’d respond. ‘Tadaima,’ she’d say next. ‘Okaeri nasai,’ we’d answer. These expressions were common and therefore useful to memorize, she told us. And then she told us about the situations wherein they were used. ‘Itte rasshai’ and ‘Itte kimasu‘ were said whenever someone left the house to go to school or work, she explained.

But R said it to me in front of the turnstile at the train station, just before I went past it to catch the Shinkansen to Tokyo.

I gave the expected reply without thinking, and smiled and waved goodbye before turning the corner to get to the platform and disappearing from his sight. I did notice him taking a deep breath after I said it, as though it was something more than a language nuance. But at the time I didn’t think it was important. At the time, I was mostly thinking about catching my train.

When I finally had some time free, I realized I didn’t even know what the phrases actually meant. I knew they were used together, but what did they translate to? I looked them up and somewhere on the Internet I found they were interpreted like this:

Itte rasshai – You’re leaving now, but please come back.
Itte kimasu – I have to go, but don’t worry because I’ll come back.

I’ve previously read about one’s significant other feeling like one’s home. I think that’s already romantic without context, but being in a long distance relationship now, it feels more relevant to me somehow. We have places we need to go and things we need to do, but at the end of the day, we come back to the person who feels like home.

Itte kimasu, Ryuichi. I love you.

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Late 2017

Well. It seems the entire month of July has passed me by. I can’t believe it’s August now. Why am I always surprised when the latter part of the year begins? It happens every year. The latter part of the year, and also my surprise to it.

Anyway, let’s recap the events of my 2017 so far, shall we?

• I came back home from New Zealand
• I re-learned Basic Japanese
• My boyfriend came for a visit
• I got a new job

The fourth item, just happened this week so I guess that’s the latest news about me. And I suppose the next few months of my 2017 will mostly be about that. I hope I do well at this new job (and company). Wish me luck!

Happy the-rest-of-2017 to you!

Visit

Finally, R’s vacation leave was approved and he was able to come back to the Philippines for 5 days! In case you don’t remember, R left the PH last December 2015 as he had to go back to his home country of Japan. Anyway, this is his first time back in a year and a half, and though it was short, it was lots and lots of fun!

I could go on and on about how fun it was, but I think photos tell a better story (on the Internet, anyway), so voilà!

At The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (ATC Branch) – Actually, he arrived last Thursday, but it was late at night so effectively, he got here last Friday and we did go to Draft (Molito Branch) that night to meet a few of his friends, but I unfortunately, forgot to take pictures of that, so this is my first picture of his visit. We went to ATC on Saturday afternoon to get his money exchanged and buy a present for his friend’s kids. Since we finished early, we had a bit of time before we had to go to his friend’s house so we chose to spend the time at a coffee shop. He actually wanted to eat crepes and I had to apologize for the lack of it at the mall. I was disappointed, too. 😦 Not to mention, that that lemon pistachio cake we got at CBTL was also disappointing. But, oh well, we enjoyed our drinks, anyway. 🙂

Saturday Night Videoke – After going to his friend’s house and swinging by TAS Roofdeck a bit (for free beer!), we went to this super amazing bar/videoke/billiards place near the office of one of his friends. This is my first time to meet everyone in his college barkada (I mean, I already met most of them last year but only virtually), and I have to say, they are super duper nice. They didn’t give me a hard time at all fitting in, even though they’ve all known each other for a really long time. Everyone talked to me and made me feel as though I’d always been a part of their group. 🙂 They even asked me to still hangout with them, even on the days when R isn’t here. Isn’t that sweet?

All-Nighter at My House – Keeping with the “tradition” of our friendship, the Sunday night dinner we had with our friends and former co-workers at my place turned into an all-nighter with these two girls, M and C not leaving until at least 4 a.m. the next day. There is a picture that was taken earlier that night and it has more people in it, but I kind of wanted to highlight this one as it shows the change that after everyone had left, it was no longer just me, M and C who had a kind of debriefing about what just happened, but R as well. Because we’re together! 😛 But seriously, I had lots of fun this night, catching up with people we hadn’t seen for a long time and spending time with new friends M2 and D, who brought their cute son along with them.

Anniversary Dinner at The Black Pig – Happy 1st Anniversary to us! If you’ve been wondering how long we’ve been together (I have a question: Why? Haha!), here it is! It’s been a year! 😀 To celebrate, we had dinner at this restaurant at the Commercenter in Alabang. R wanted to eat steak and though I guess their specialty is actually pork (Iberico Ham!), their beef dishes weren’t bad either. R had the US Angus Choice Striploin and I had the Prime Angus Short Ribs. We enjoyed both dishes as well as the wine and cocktail we ordered. 🙂

Also, look at R in his かっこいい blue shirt. He’s not really the type to dress up, so it was such a kilig moment when I saw that he’d prepared an outfit for our anniversary dinner. ❤ I sincerely wish I wore a better dress as I think the one I’m wearing is more appropriate for a brunch date, but a dress is a dress is a dress, isn’t it? Also, he did say that I looked nice in it, so I guess that means it’s fine. 😀

And one last one:

Photo taken outside the bar/billiards/videoke place because I thought the lighting was nice and bright, except it turned out to be too bright so I had to turn this into a black & white photo. Strange lighting aside, I really like our smiles here. 🙂

Until next time, which hopefully won’t take too long.

 

Rant about rants

So many things went wrong today. I don’t want to go into detail as that will only annoy me again. Don’t get me wrong, the reason I’m here is because I really wanted to rant about them. Isn’t that what blogs are for? But I really do feel bad whenever I write something negative in here and then see it again a couple of weeks/months/years later and I realize that I no longer feel the same way and mainit lang talaga ulo ko at the time and that’s why I said those things. Even though ngayon, I really feel like I have valid points. I mean, you don’t keep a hungry person hungry. And when you charge the wrong amount to someone’s credit card, and you admit it because it’s true, you’re supposed to correct your mistake immediately. Not, almost a week later and it actually hasn’t even been corrected yet and kung hindi pa’ko tumawag ni hindi ako makakakuha ng sagot n’yo, ano?

Right. How did people get rid of their bad feelings before the Internet? I should know because I existed before the Internet did, right? Or, actually, maybe not. Technically, I think, the Internet and I were born the same year. Not the Internet as we know it now, of course. But like, the very first version of it. I think. I can’t really remember. Masyadong mainit ulo ko to remember. Next time na lang ang historically accurate history lesson. Matutulog muna ako.