May 22, 2025
Guests:
K, M
Discussion Content:
K and M arrived together, and M brought some castella cake and tea for us all. She had recently gone to Yamaguchi and Nagasaki prefectures, and Nagasaki is famous for its castella. She said they went with a cheap round-trip plane ticket, which works out much cheaper than even the Shinkansen (bullet train). I think she said the price difference was 20,000-yen vs 40,000-yen.
As the salon will be finishing next week, and K won’t be able to attend the last session, she brought me a present she had made of soap wrapped in felt. Apparently, the felt wrapping helps to keep the soap from going soggy.
M’s relatives have a fruit farm in Yamaguchi, and as the farm fields sometimes get destroyed by wild boars, they also have a boar-trap cage, and M showed us a video of a boar in the cage.
M said they contact someone to come and collect the boar, and she began to tell us how they kill it, but as I didn’t want to hear about that, I covered my ears with my hands and said “Yucky!”, which made them laugh.
M said she had only talked to this particular relative online, or via video, so this was the first time she had met him in-person. She asked about the phrase “in real life”, and I said this is often used online and is written as “irl”.
K said she can’t come to the salon next week as she has rented some shelf space somewhere to display and sell her felt fashion items.
For some reason, someone mentioned the Japanese word “uchuu”, and I said it’s strange that this word is used for both “space” and “the universe”, and explained the difference between the two in English. “Space” refers to the empty areas outside of the Earth and between planets, etc., but “the universe” is the name for everything that exists.
As an example sentence, I said people say things like, “God created the universe”, or “The universe started with the Big-Bang”, or “Trust the universe”, or “Connect with the universe”, etc.
To this, M asked, “What do people mean when they say ‘connect with the universe’?”, and I said they mean to meditate and get a feeling that their consciousness has expanded, or to simply feel in touch with nature, for example.
Useful phrases:
price difference
soggy
wild boar
cover your ears with your hands
yucky
in-person
in real life (irl)
space vs the universe
The Big-Bang
meditate
consciousness
in touch with nature