Smiles and Sembei

In fourth grade my parents and I went to Hawaii and stayed in a fancy-wancy hotel that had a Japanese garden with a large pond. There were fishing poles against the wall and the staff encouraged kids to “fish” for koi.
Check out these two pictures:
• The yellow arrow points to me. Yes. Once upon a time I was ten.
• The blue arrow points to the water where the koi swam (not ONE BIT interested in the corn on my hook).
• The orange arrow points to Mr. and Mrs. Takahashi (who happens to be standing behind the palm tree).
















The Takahashis were the first Japanese people I ever met. Mr. Takahashi took LOTS of pictures and we spent about 45 minutes fishing and getting to know each other. They showed me pictures of their granddaughter about my age.
There were two problems – They didn’t speak English. We didn’t speak Japanese.
This is what we did - We smiled a lot. We used hand gestures. We looked up words and phrases in a pocket dictionary Mrs. Takahashi had in her purse.

A few weeks after we returned from Hawaii a large, flat box arrived in the mail. It was addressed to me! It had AIRMAIL and FRAGILE stamped all over it. The return address was in Japanese characters. I carefully opened it to find a box of sembei, a crunchy Japanese snack. Yum!
There was a note inside – in Japanese.
I wrote a nice thank you note back – in English.

To earn some KenYen, record three or four ways you might make yourself understood to someone that doesn't speak English.