Daytrip

Yesterday we took Nico out for a little daytrip, to pick up more baby supplies and to make her official. We went to the local shiyakshou, or City Hall, to have her name entered into our kouseki, or family registry. Kind of analogous to a birth certificate in the States. This is how Nico's full name looks in Japanese:


Huh? you might be saying. Well let me school you.... The first bit is our family name, "McKible" which as it's spelled out above in katakana (one of the 3 Japanese alphabets) is pronounced more as "Ma' kiburu".

The middle bit is in written in kanji (one of those other Japanese alphabets... not really an alphabet as it's based on Chinese ideograms, but another one of the 3 systems used here for writing) and can be read as "Nico". But when it comes to names here, the relationship between the written kanji and the way a name is spoken is pretty arbitrary. There's a number of ways you could say the kanji above. But we picked them to be read as Nico. Also since they're ideograms each one contains it's own meaning (well, actually each one could contain several... yeah, it's a fuckin' complicated language.). The combination we picked though reads as, "calling laughter" or "calling a smile". For a while we had "smiling flower" instead, but decided that would be just a bit over the top saccharine.

And the last bit is "Raquel" or as it's pronounced here "Rakeru".



Well, after all that we were pooped and needed a little break.



Looks like we attracted a little audience as well.