Today I went to downtown Osaka to attend my kintsugi ( a traditional Japanese technique for repairing broken china) lesson. While waiting for a train in a line, a foreign woman spoke to me in Japanese. She looked like an Indian woman. She asked me if the next train would stop "Honmachi". When I replied in Japanese, she showed me her cellphone screen to ask me how much the fare would be, and the train seemed to be delay by around fifteen minutes, so she also asked me whether she could get discount. I checked her cellphone screen, and it certainly showed the fare and discount. Even so, I'd never heard of such a situation before, I explained it in Japanese at first. She didn't seem to fully understand what I was saying, so I switched languages and started explaining it in English. When she heard my English, she looked very surprised and said, "Wow! I've been living in Japan over for two years, but I've never heard anyone speak English as well as you do! Most Japanese people aren't good at speaking English at all, and I'm very impressed. I do speak English too" in Japanese.

While chatting, the train arrived, and we got on. She kept speaking to me in Japanese. She came from Bangladesh and said she would like to work in Japan for at least five more years. She had first worked in Tokyo, but she couldn't come to like the place and the people. I told her that people in Osaka are more friendly, and she agreed. She said she chose Japan because she believes it's the safest country in Asia. She loves Japanese culture so much, especially traditional one, but she complained how much hard reading kanji was. She also mentioned that Japanese people love American culture. It was funny she said that, and I thought that's so true. I think it relates to education after the WWII. Since she sometimes showed branch expression because she didn't fully understand, I explained things using a mix of English and Japanese. However, she never spoken English to me. I thought she might feel more confident speaking Japanese than English. I'm not good at catching up with the Indian accented English, so if her English sounded like that, I probably would straggle.

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