EEEEEEEEEEEEE!

[alexandral]

Holidays
EEEEEE! I am back from holidays!! They were wonderful!! We stayed with my sister-in-law and her family in their nice house in London suburbs. They are lovely family and Sasha enjoyed playing with her cousins very much. Weather was wonderful and this made these holidays even more special (we don't have much of the really good weather here, so we treasure it :D) We also attended our church's convention in one of the hotels near Richmond Park and this was a fabulous experience. Venue was nice, Richmond Park is beautiful and we visited few wonderful little cafés and restaurants in the Richmond area. EEEEEEE!

Spooks
Even more EEEEEEE! I am full of the new fictional loves. I am quickly going through 4 season of "Spooks" which is so fabulous and intelligent and stylishly filmed! baleanoptera, have you watched "Spooks"??? For a long time I was lamenting Tom's departure, but I must say, Adam (Captain Wentworth in another life) and also Harry And Ruth are so great!

Anego
And another new love is Japanese drama "Anego" of which I have watched 5 episodes already and I am absolutely in love with it. I think this is something I would really recommend to a person who never watched an Asian drama before. It is impeccably written and reminds me more of some Western films and shows like "Bridget Jones Diaries" then of any Asian drama I have watched previously.



Why do I like it so?

+ I really love the main heroine, Noda Naoko (played by Shinohara Ryoko who is GREAT), a 32 year old singleton in her search for happiness. She is warm-hearted, she is altruistic, she is brave and she is beautiful. Take me right, I love spirited teenage girl characters, but I seem to reach my saturation with this type of character and someone closer to my age group with problems I can really relate to makes such a welcome change for me..

+ Akanishi Jin who is playing Naoko's love interest Kurosawa Akihiko is gorgeous!! So gorgeous that his levels of gorgeousness are enough to make any show good.

+ Some really interesting cultural and social issues are raised in this show. It was, for example, very interesting for me to discover that Japanese workers normally start as temporary workers in a corporation and only if they show themselves well can they progress to the permanent worker level. Another interesting thing is a whole elaborate culture of "blind date" in Japan . And hhmm, married women with children in Japan still seem to be mostly staying at home. (I wonder if this is correct?)

So EEEEEEE! I love it!!! I would really love some recommendations for shows with Shinohara Ryoko and Akanishi Jin!!

PS: I have uploaded "Mansfield Park" and "Northanger Abbey", I will post the links as soon as I check them at home!!

Comments

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

I can stomach Korean dramas only this much I very much prefer Jdramas as they are shorter and they don't draw out the Angst too much. :)

I think I am just getting saturated with angst.. Also pacing in so many Korean dramas is not brilliant. I still love ALTK , "My Girl" and "Winter Queen" to bits, but few of the Korean dramas I watched (or watched up to the point) did move slowly and seemed to be full of the same scenes again and again.

Once you have finished Anego we can discuss all you want :)

No spoilers for me then? :D :D

[scottishlass.livejournal.com]

nope, no spoilers :)

Yeah that is also something I have noticed with Korean dramas. They are cute as hell, even the Angsty ones, but they are just so damn long and drawn out. I'm always like: Yeah, Yeah, I get the drift. The series where it really got annyoing was My Delightful Girl Chunn-Huyang. At the end I was so annoyed, I even thought it would be better they stay apart for good to get me out of this misery :s

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

Yeah that is also something I have noticed with Korean dramas. They are cute as hell, even the Angsty ones, but they are just so damn long and drawn out. I'm always like: Yeah, Yeah, I get the drift.

Yep, it really started getting me recently. For me it is usually interesting up to a point when two protagonists discover that they love each other, but then angst kicks in and it is not that I don't like it, but it is often contrived somehow. I just finished "Hotelier" before I went on holidays and it had some really good points (namely gorgeousness of suffering Bae Yong Jun :D), but I had to fast forward so many times.

** Sigh ** I think I am a new Jdrama addict. :D

[scottishlass.livejournal.com]

Welcome to the dark side :D
I don't know why but I really like Jdramas, just because they are shorter than the Korean or Taiwanese ones are not really a reason. I think I have a knack for understanding Japanese more than Chinese or Korean, I can even have them on TV while doing something else and still get the main drift of a drama, which I can't when it is a Tw- or kdrama.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

Oh, I understand! It really adds something when you are able to understand the language. All languages are so different and some things just can't be expressed absolutely "to a tee" correctly in a different language. I imagine it be particular the case with Japanese language because it is very different from any Western ones.

I am still hoping to get a response to my Japanese course request. ** Sigh **

PS: And I noticed that you can understand Russian too!!

[scottishlass.livejournal.com]

My Japanese is rudimentary at best - I wanted to take a Japanese class but they are so damn expensive here (150 € for 8 hours) so I try to learn more by listening. Perhaps in 20-30 years I'll be sufficient in every day Japanese LOL Learning by osmosis :)

PS: And I noticed that you can understand Russian too!!
I can only read it, but I can't write it myself, let alone speak it. We had to take a course in university when all that hype witht he unification went on in the early 90's, most of the time I look up words in my dictionary though :)

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

I am trying to apply for a corse at our University, something like "Japanese language and culture" but the people I contected are not writing back. I will try to make more effort..

Oh, I was so impressed when noticed that you understood rika_66 post!!

[scottishlass.livejournal.com]

Ganbatte, Alexandra :)

Well I understand the gist of a post, a lot of words don't even turn up in my dictionary, so it is more a guessing what rika_66 meant while writing :)

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

It is always easier to read then to listen. And to listen then to speak.

[scottishlass.livejournal.com]

Oh yes!! But I really want to learn Japanese. What I learnt while working for a Japanese company in the 1990's and now with casual Japanese from the dramas, it is such a beautiful language, I want to know more about it and understand it. Unfortunately over here you first have to do a Kanji course and then you can speak the language. I wish you could learn by doing Romanji, the Kyrilic for Russian was already hard to learn and I was younger back then. My poor brain :s

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

wish you could learn by doing Romanji, the Kyrilic for Russian was already hard to learn and I was younger back then. My poor brain :s

I am almost afraid to learn a new language, to be honest. Learning English by going "cold turkey" was quite a bumpy ride. Even though I thought I knew some English before moving to UK I was very very wrong. :D And English alphabet has less letters then Cyrillic!!! :D

[scottishlass.livejournal.com]

Isn't it always like this? I mean if we only depend on school English, we are totally lost. You can write essay and stuff but every day English? No chance.

[alexandral.livejournal.com]

Yes, definitely. Watching films and reading books helps a lot.