Confucius said: “Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?” Jolanta and Nara came from Latvia. Two friends and I went to the Osaka Kansai International Airport to accept them. Jolanta is a female psychologist and Nara is her daughter. I invited them in the last year when we met at ICASSI in Györ, Hungary.
I hope she will have many chats with Japanese Adlerians in English. The Japanese learn English for many years at school, but they cannot speak it. The biggest reason is they have no opportunity to use it. If they are motivated to speak, I am sure that they remember what they learned at school. Jolanta has many merits. She speaks English fluently though she is not a native speaker. Her pronunciation is easy to hear for the Japanese, perhaps because of vowels. She is rather a small lady and is not so aggressive as West Europeans. And, first of all, she is very encouraging in her personality.
We met at the gate, hugged each other, and took a bus to the city center. She was surprised at many things by many strange reasons. The color of the sea, white and square buildings, colorful advertisements, mountains, etc. Everything is different from a northern Baltic country. There, buildings are black, windows are round, the highest mountain is 300 meters high…
We prepared a furnished apartment in near my home. When she arrived there, she asked me where she got a converter for an electric plug. They wanted to use their computer, but the plug was different from Japanese. We went to Namba, a busy shopping area, where was a big electric shop. It had to be so an exciting experience for them, as Namba is one of the busiest towns in Japan. Anyway, their two months in our country began. Is it not delightful?