The first post is always the hardest

er.. right then... testing testing 1 2 3.... is this thing on? Ok, then I'll begin.
I have started the blog that I always promised my friend and now ex-work colleague, probably never believed that I would. So firstly a big 'na na ne na na' to him with knobs on.
An explaination of the title first, for those less knowledgeable in Japanese than myself (I don't know what 3 year olds would be doing looking at my blog anyway)
I have now been in Japan for around 6 months, arriving on the 2 October to start a engineering contract in Yoshida, near Niigata. Now I'm not a language person - ask my poor German teacher, I'm an engineer and therefore deal in logical stuff most of the time. Language has a habit of being logical to a point before someone decided to get silly and make up all sorts of rules that make things unnecessarily complicated. With 3 alphabets, many polite and impolite ways of saying things, and numberous counting systems depending on what size, shape or day of the week it is, Japanese is basically bloody hard. Despite a few baffling lessons using a beginners book helpfully written intirely in Japanese the sum total of my language comfort zone is

1) 'watashi wa Gareth desu' which means 'I am Gareth'. Unfortunately, there is no 'th' in Japanese, and 'r's and 'l's are a bit difficult so it's actully pronounced 'Gar less u', close enough.
2) 'watashi wa Engineer desu' which means 'I am an Engineer', at which point most people are very surprised because 99% of all the foreigners out here are English teachers.