Today I went into the mountains for the first time since getting back. I had missed those train people. Every week on Thursday I ride the same train to Chiyokawa station and get picked up to go to the Center. When I get on the train at Kameoka, some very interesting characters get off. There is one foreigner. I always want to know who he is. He isn’t always on the train… but he comes quite often and gets off at my town and I don’t know why. There are two others--two men. One is very big and tall. The other is very short and squat. And they walk together. It is the CUTEST thing ever. The little short one takes these quick little steps to keep up with the long steps of the tall guy. Sometimes though they don’t walk together and I always worry that they have had a fight.

It is something you never do when you drive to work. You don’t notice the people around you. But on a train you often begin to recognize faces and patterns. There is the running man who we use to time our walk to work. He always seems to be late so he runs. We know if we are late by where he is when we run into each other.

My newsletter group came and we edited the articles for this edition.

Kikuchi-san and I talked over lunch about my trip home and we shared different Youtube videos with each other. He and Ijiri-san then hit me with a tough question…

“What are the rules for using the word “the” ?”

They handed me a post it with the words

“Smell of rain”
“The smell of rain”
“The smell of the rain”
And asked me which were correct. Well I am not an English teacher. I can tell you which ones sound correct and the nuances between them but I cannot tell you why or how to tell grammatically when to use which. So I ended up explaining to them that the 2nd and 3rd ones were correct but would be used differently.

I would say something like “I like THE smell of rain.”
Or
“THE smell of THE rain was soothing.”

So using “the” in front of rain means just that rain, just that time. Whereas without “the” it is all rain.

Anyway, it was just an interesting conversation. It is amazing how things that I just naturally understand are so difficult to explain.