The exceptionally eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that I changed the way I wrote "Paul" in the blog title--from「パール」(roughly, "paa-ru") to「ポール」(roughly, "poh-ru"). 「パール」is what I've been using in the past, and it's not actually wrong, but「ポール」seems to be more common. If you use Google translate, 「パール」is translated as "pearl", with "Paul" as an alternate if you mouse over the translation. (For the computer set, my dictionary also translates it as "Perl" and, for the knitting aficionados, "purl"). 「ポール」translates first as "Paul" but also as "pole" or "poll".
There don't seem to be hard and fast rules on this, but there are conventional spellings, especially for English words that have become part of the Japanese language. 「ボール」("boh-ru") can either be "bowl" or "ball". (You might have to look closely or enlarge the text to see the difference between that and「ポール」-- one has two little hash marks, and one has a circle. It can be rough on those of us with aging eyes.) Such are the joys of trying to do a phonetic transcription between languages that use different sounds.
In other news, I leave on Friday, arriving in Tokyo Saturday night at 10:30. I'm a little apprehensive about making my way to my apartment for the first time around midnight...I might just stay the first night at a hotel near the airport.
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