HOME POST || Mon 4th - Wed 6th July
Starting off with a variety this week!
Mon 4th - NHK Easy News
I read an article about the four day long interruption of au’s phone/internet services. The first paragraph took me a solid three reads to parse because I wasn’t sure what 宅配便 was (in hindsight, duh) and it knocked my confidence, but the rest of the article was surprisingly a breeze.
The comment from the 50 year old man waiting in front of the Tokyo store regarding how inconvenient the situation was and how he would be considering switching to another company if the outages lasted any longer got a laugh out of me. It’s somewhat comforting to see that the language of customer dissatisfaction is universal.
Tue 5th - ５分後に意外な結末 「バス停」
Yesterday I was stuck on trains between London and Leicester so I took along this book, a collection of short stories that are meant to have surprising endings, and a book that is indisputably above my current reading level. I read the first short story -「バス停」- which took me around 45 minutes. About two pages in I had the bright idea that this could be a good book to document my N3-N2 progress. So, on the last page I jotted some pencil notes down of my understanding of the narrative and I’m going to do that for each short story, then, after N3 I can read them all again and write a new summary, and the same after N2.
I did understand the characters - a new bus driver covering a route between a small mountain village and the main town, and an old lady who used the bus regularly for visiting town for shopping. She then seems to go missing and it’s mentioned that it seems like she could have died. Later the bus driver meets an elderly man who claims that after he hurt his leg the old lady was doing his shopping for him, hence her catching the bus. Then I’m not really clear on the stretch from this conversation to the end as it seems like a small period of time might pass - at the end there’s a description of the old man alighting from the bus and his body just disappearing into thin air (I think). So I’m not sure if the elderly woman and man were ghosts all along and that’s the surprise? The woman was described as having a demon like face at one point in a bumpy journey.
Anyway, I could be entirely off the mark in my comprehension and I can’t wait to re-read later in the year and laugh at myself. 
Wed 6th - よつばと！ Vol.2, Ch.8
Well look who’s finally starting Vol.2 of よつばと！after saying she was going to do it during the Winter challenge.
It was great to read this after yesterday’s headache. I loved Ena’s attempt at diffusing the mood after Miura told Yotsuba she was bad at drawing in this chapter, that whole scene was wonderfully comedic.
Think I’m going to stick to よつばと！ for the next two days and maybe try another of the ５分後に意外な結末 short stories at the weekend. 