I know it's been a bit of a while since I updated (although clearly not as long as some people- hurumph!!) For a while after coming back from Aomori I felt like I had nothing to say but actually things are quite different this year, so I thought I'd just write a bit about that and if you get really bored you can just skip to the pretty pictures at the end...

Work has been pretty manic overall - being January we've been having our accounts audited, all slightly complicated by the fact that we're changing accountants this year; luckily they finished their fieldwork last week so things should hopefully calm down a bit until HQ get their hands on the final version and then the real questions will come rolling in! With that and all the other New Year random stuff, I've been unable to really get my teeth into my translation assignments but I'm hoping to put some time aside for that this week.

My translation class started on Wednesday - which was really cool. It's mostly Japanese people (turns out we are translating both ways -eek!) but everyone seemed pretty relaxed and open to discussion - and the teacher was pretty cool. I was expecting it to be very rule-bound, you know, must stick to all the precise vocab and grammar requirements and all that (which of course form the basis) but once we got past that, she seemed to be giving the message that, as translator, you control what is conveyed and can employ all kinds of strategies to get it across as accurately as possible - which I found very empowering. Often when translating I feel cornered, between understanding what is said in the source text and knowing what can be said in the target language, so it will be great if I can pick up lots of ideas for getting around those restraints from this course.

Have also started German classes with Tess - mostly just for fun but also so that I can speak to Hardy (I'm lucky that all three of my Directors at work are from different countries!) without anyone else being able to understand! I have totally forgotten everything we did for GCSE so it's a really weird feeling to kind of get the gist of what's going on without being able to understand all the individual words!

In other news, people keep having babies - Joy last week and Daizo the week before (congratulations guys!) which is all very exciting and cute (awww).

Went out today and had a wander around London - took a walk along the Thames from London Bridge to Westminster, taking cheesy photos along the way...