Heads or tails

Prepping for the JLPT and I'm trying to read a lot of Japanese in the wild, so to speak, so I'm keeping up on that blog I posted about. The writer just took a trip to Germany and on one of her recent entries, I noticed an example of something that I often have trouble with when speaking.

Japanese is a strong head-final language, meaning that the main part of a phrase comes at the end (as opposed to English, which is a strong head-first language), and the first part of that entry demonstrates that pretty well:

パリでの自由行動日、前日のウェディングパーティーで夜更かしした後、たっぷり寝てお腹ペコペコで目覚めた私

Which in English reads

I, who on a free day in Paris after the day I stayed up late at a wedding party had slept a lot and woke up hungry, [...]

The [...] is because everything there is a modifier to 私 (watashi, "I"). A stilted but more literal translation would be, "The me who on a free day [etc]."

When speaking Japanese, I still have a hard time sometimes swapping my processing around and have to stop in the middle of a sentence and start over when I realize that I should have already said what I'm about to say.