It was drizzling, mixed with snow outside and it was very cold. I was still playing chess when I realized that it was almost time to go and I hadn't even had my lunch. I quickly had lunch and left the house for UCLA extension Tokyo Center. I could not believe there were so many people wandering around in Shinjyuku in the cold winter rain on a Saturday.
It was our fifth session that day and during the BEC course, I learnt a lot about the customs of Business English. Walking into the class I noticed there were today's agendas on the white board. The first one was to analyze graphs and explain in details what each one meant. We studied bar graphs, line graphs and pie charts first and then continued to look at real-life figures of a company and briefly explained its stock chart.
I'm getting pretty good at this business of analyzing data trends!
In every class we do a little bit of Cultural Studies and that day, we looked at culture in terms of gender and predominancy. It is said we can find out whether your culture of a country or your company is predominantly masculine or feminine by looking at the roles given to men and women in the commune.
In my opinion, most of Asian corporations are predominantly masculine because generally males have authoritative roles and they have power over others there.
Is the culture of your nation or your company predominantly masculine or feminine? I think if you have read my past blog articles, you'll understand that where I come from is the former.
Our next agenda was Financial Information. We were handed out dialogues regarding financial information to read and practice and then we briefly learnt about income statements and balance sheets.
I had the knowledge of financial statements from a management course I enrolled in at the University of Nepal but it's already been 10 years since then and I had forgotten almost everything about them!
After the class my classmates and I decided to go for tea but some of us had prior engagements after the class. Only four of us stayed behind and we began looking for cafés. We went into more than two cafés but none had seats for four. Most of the seats were already taken because it was cold and raining outside and people were trying to stay warm drinking hot tea and coffee.
We decided to go to Renoir Café but the place was also full and we had to wait for a few minutes to be seated. After getting our seats, we discussed about financial statements over hot coffee. Everything seemed clear to me after talking with my classmates.
For me, last Saturday was an amazing day. I got a chance to refresh my memory of my schooling days in Nepal and I feel I got closer to my new friends!
I hope you got to taste a bit of my life in Tokyo after reading this blog.
Thanks!
