Exam yesterday. The JLP (Japanese language proficiency) exam to be precise. Having done a past paper last week and completely flunked it I was trying to decide if it was even worth bothering with. Support from various areas was good, ranging from the argument that it was after all a day
off work
out in Beppu, that it was good practice for next year, and most unmotivatingly that it was really easy and I should have no problems. Of course the latter (from at least two people) would have been more reassuring if they hadn't have been fluent in the language themselves... as it is I've only just learned to read in a reasonably flowing manner, having spent the last few months sounding out each pathetic syllable and having to constantly correct myself when I work out what the word actually is. Anyway, confident in the likelihood that the test would be excrutiating, I decided to go on the basis that I hadn't been to Beppu in the day before and moreover I quite fancied visiting Monkey Mountain.
The test was ok-ish and bizarrely fun as we watched the invigilators trying to follow the very stringent instructions in pamplets, holding up yellow cards then red cards then yellow - no! that should have been a red one, gomenesai, another yellow one, in antics that most closely resembled a soccer match between Italy and Brasil.
After the test, Katie and I headed out to Monkey mountain for our quota of ooh-ing and aahh-ing. The story of this place is quite a good one. It was set up in 1952 by the ex-mayor of Oita City in response to a growing problem of these little guys raiding farms and destroying rice crops. He lured them in by, and I quote from the pamphlet "scattering bait and blowing a conch (a kind of shell horn)". Now there are over a thousand monkeys - all of them Japanese macaques - living here in a pretty large area stretching up into the mountain. They're all used to the tourists that visit in their droves so the little guys just appear from nowhere and run round your feet like nutters. After heeding some good advice from the large board at the entrance "don't feed the monkeys. Don't make fun of the monkeys" and from Jorge, who had a close encounter when he visited "don't make eye contact, man", we spent far longer than we should have done just watching them. Katie put it best when she said that some of the interest in them is because they are so similar to humans, but unlike humans seem to have no sense of embarrassment, so when leap and nearly miss, watching them slide down a tree as their grip fails is as funny as when they pick themselves up and do exactly the same thing again. I guess animals bring out the childish fascination in all of us, but I don't think I'd have gone quite as far as the pamphlet, which in an act of translation that only becomes wrong the more you look at it, says that "in 1977 thirty of the monkeys were given to Italy and ten to Korea the next year. The monkeys have contributed to friendly relations with these countries." Now, they're cute, but fulfilling a diplomatic role? I just don't buy it...
Luckily for me there are at least two ways of knitting. Also luckily for me, my fabulous Finnish friend Heidi took it upon herself to make sure I could knit 'continental' last year. 
