It's Lil' Bow Wow!
Welcome to the angry dome fellow foreigners (we're all foreigners somewhere like)! The seminar on being stared at starts at 9 and lunch will be some weird piece of crap you can't quite prove is not food.
Week 70 of 104 and finally the streams have been crossed. Meg got to see what I do at work. The reason for this was the annual culture day was on and I had been roped in to help out with... whatever it is ANY of them do from day to day. The upshot was that I got to spend an hour at the crafts table painting a plate surrounded by women in their 70's and got roped into eating a box of rice and sweetpotato. This was by far and away the best thing I could have ended up with as there was also a massive pot on show, filled with shell covered eggs, tentacles and if my nose is to be believed, human wee.
It's called Oden and is a fucking warcrime in a pot. Meant to be a winter warmer, it is a constant reminder to Meg that there are worse things in the world than my soon to be patented Fried Salad. It's not going to be funny, indeed it'll be gravely serious but here's a picture of some Oden.
It's what little boys are made of. Also, Mao.
There are few foods that I would rather consume as a suppository than in the traditional fashion but ones with fish paste and pink spirals are as Kate Bush would say, "Running up that hill."
Add to that list Konjac.
Greyer than a Ken Barlow lecture on printers.
A jelly so tough it's actually banned in the EU and US due to the fact that 18 people have choked on it between 1998 and 2005. There'll be liberal amounts of this in the Oden too. Please enjoy!
So anyway after dodging that stinky bullet I basically loafed around for the day trying (unsuccesfully) to avoid my students pronging me in the dondalinger with their index fingers in front of the village's Head Honchos. When Meg turned up we ended up having to stand for about 10-15 photos with random Japanesers who just liked the cut of us.
I'm pretty sure if enough important people die I get to be the Prime Minister here. That said there are a lot of boneheads between me and the big chair and about ten of them are in my village wandering from rice harvest to school opening with a sash and a bad haircut. One particular runtish little bobblehead is getting on one's tits with a sterling skill. In the past week alone he has given me and Meg separately a bowl of his shit for not being entirely fluent at Japanese.
Unfortunately I have revealed my hand of being someway okay at the language by now so I can't shrug and give him an "I dunno" which is usually what I would do when someone is trying to "help" me from doing what I want to do. So now I'm not sure how I can re-ignore this moany little road cone. For the time being I plan on disposing of him in a big pot of wee-smelling winter stew but am open to suggestions.
The other thing I've been at in the last week has been organising a bus and accomodation for 30 people to go to the far corner of my island for a thing we're doing next week. Basically a piss up.
The whole thing became an exercise in pain-in-the-assery after a few miscommunications got the better of your intrepid adventurer and he was forced... by the fault of everyone else in the world though definitely not him... to make a massive and egregious error.
It's all fixed now though, with the end result being only that we have rankled a particularly un-easy going, stereotype-stomping Jamaican.
Pictured: Bullshit.
She got all fucking Red Dawn on us after one of the girls on the committee emailed her with what was meant to be good news. In return she got a hail storm of Jamaican ire about how offended she was by us trying to help her. Or something. It didn't make any of a lot of sense.
That said I definitely hope nothing heavy ever falls on her. Especially not poo. Loads of it.
In other news I have begun a Christmas present buying spree the likes of which the Japanese have never seen. I already finished buying all the tat, cack and Phil Dalls (maybe just my family for that one) I'm bringing back and now all I have to do is buy the crap.
We'll be all set!
Any specific Japanese present requests will be catered for, just send me on an email and I'll see what I can get for you. We've exactly one month on the clock before I'm back spud side, so get back to me on the pronto.
Separately to this, some of my students have found out throught their extra evening English tutor that はし are in English... chopsticks. The end result of this has been them coming up to me with a solemn expression and using the word in every grammatical permutation they have learned.
e.g. "These are the chopsticks that I find so exciting"
I'm actually kind of proud of them.
In the office tomorrow so check for me on the facebook, but apart from that see you in a month!
Gigglidy gigglidy gone!
Oden in Japan
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