weekend

So, this was a busy weekend. We think we've found buyers for our car, Saturday was spent learning what you need to do when you find a buyer for your car. We turned out to be very unprepared for the part where they said, "OK, we want it, and we'll give you a great offer for it."

Sunday we went to the Field Museum to see the Mythic Creatures exhibit, which was really interesting. It wasn't necessarily a lot of new information for me, but I really liked seeing how myths are still present in a lot of cultures, even though we may not rely on ours as much anymore. There's a Japanese creature called a kappa, they used to be thought to lure children and travelers close to water and then pull them in and eat them. Like the Grimm's fairy tales the stories have gotten less scary, and now they're sort of silly critters who love cucumbers. They get their power out of water from a depression in their skulls that holds water. All you have to do is bow to them, and they feel obliged to bow back, dumping their water and then having to scurry back to the pond. There was a list of common Japanese phrases still used today. The only one I can remember is "kappa no he," which was "no more than a kappa fart," to say that something turned out to be not a very big deal. We do still use a lot of cliches in our language, but I can't think of very many that come directly from fairy tales.