Parking spaces and dinosaurs

Yeah, it's a two blog night. I just thought of two different things I wanted to type about here.

In my very grumpy blog from the other day, I mentioned that I was told the parking space I thought was mine this entire time at my apartment building isn't actually the one I thought it was.

The next day, I got a letter from the building owners and I could tell that it was on the topic of the parking spaces, so I figured that they were just telling me what I already knew.

But, there seemed to be more to the letter, so I brought it into my Japanese lesson and let my teacher look at it.

It turns out that the space 55 has been erased, so the person who is assigned 55 has been parking in 54 (my actual space). The content of the letter was actually asking me if I had any complaints about my parking space being taken so much. But -I- had just barely learned about that spot the day before, so of course I had no issue with it.

My Japanese teacher called the company that owns my building and found out that the space I've been using (52) is unassigned to anyone. Of course, that's obvious because I've been parking there for almost a year with no complaints. Anyway, I told her to tell them that I would like to continue to park in 52 if that was acceptable and the person assigned to 55 could park in 54.

I don't know many details, actually, but I did get permission to park in 52 for now.

It was a pretty crazy mixup and I thought it was funny that I was asked if I had problems with the person parking in 54 just a day after I first parked there.

Now for the "dinosaurs" part of my post.

I realized recently that I've been making a pretty funny Japanese mistake for months now.

A way to say international exchange in Japanese is "kokusai (international) kouryuu (exchange/interaction).

Instead of "kouryuu", I've been saying "kyouryuu" which, I figured out recently, means "dinosaur".

"International dinosaur"