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Broadcasting to an audience of three (and a goldfish)...
Comment, ramblings and musings... life through the eyes of a Japanologist...
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Tuesday, August 27, 2002 |
 2
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Breakfast Show Staple Randomhaiku of the day (from The Genuine Haiku Generator)
foamy tall elms blush
free shimmering frivolous
strawberry jutting
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Finding a cockroach in your apartment is- in some odd way- a bit like
finding out you've got some sort of illness, I suppose. The initial
reaction is shock, disbelief, horror, but after a while it just becomes
something you learn to live with.
To be honest, I'm surprised how
heiki I am already about sitting in my apartment just feet from
the last known whereabouts of the Cockroach From Hell, just one day
after The Sighting. I'm still much more alert than normal to rustling
sounds- or, for that matter, anything small and blackish-coloured- but
not to the extent that I'd expected I would be. Life is returning to
normal, or as normal as life can ever be when you're living with the
knowledge that you're sharing an apartment with a cockroach the size of
a small bus...
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Having been to virtually every shop in central Etajima (makes it sound
like a huge conurbation- the Greater Etajima Metropolitan Area, or
something) and failed singuarly to find Kirin Lemon (the closest thing
to lemonade there is) for my Pimms, I gave in and bought C.C. Lemon
instead. It's much more lemony than lemonade- a bit like drinking
straight lemon juice, in fact- so I didn't expect that it would mix well
with Pimms, but in fact it worked perfectly! Problem solved!
(I'd be
even happier if the colour of Pimms didn't remind me so much of bile,
though...)
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1
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One of the best things about holding cooking lessons is you get to eat
'proper' food (i.e., not stuff from the convenience store...!) without
the hassle of cooking anything yourself. I especially enjoy my 'chicken
curry-curried eggs-bread and butter pudding-lemonade' lesson, because
(1) I like chicken curry but hate messing around with raw chicken
because it feels so slimy, and (2) I get to eat lots of bread and butter
pudding! It's different with adults, but it's almost a given that with
children, the curried eggs and the chicken curry will fill them, so
they'll only take a tiny piece of b-and-b pudding. Which means that
there's lots left over. Which means that I got to eat nearly half a
pudding this evening! Damn good pudding, too- I deliberately made sure I
brought the best one home with me...
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I've found an unfortunate issue with Mac OS X 10.2 (apart from the fact
that Inkwell doesn't recognise my handwriting, that is). I use Japanese
Word under Japanese Mac OS X, but with the Finder set to default to
English. I can see Japanese file names in the Finder without any
problem, but when I save a file in Word with a Japanese filename, it
shows up as gibberish in the Finder. I tried setting the Finder to
Japanese, which solves the problem, but then Radio's (i.e., this
weblog's) dates become gibberish. I think I'll just stop using Japanese
filenames from Word... I wonder if other programs have the same problem?
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Spent the afternoon- after the JHS students had finally tidied the
kitchen- finishing up the handout for the International Understanding
Lessons explanation meeting tomorrow. It's difficult to say what I want
to say without inciting a riot, so I'm having to talk around everything-
which makes writing the handout a slow process. I'm trying to make my
meaning obvious without being so direct as to get everyone's backs up.
Although I suspect that backs will be got up no matter how I phrase
things. I get the feeling that the teachers aren't going to take kindly
to being made aware of the cold, hard facts...
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One problem with cookery classes at this time of year, though, is that
the kitchens always turn into something approximating a cauldron. There
is air conditioning, but to be brutally honest, it doesn't work. In
fact, it was so hot and sticky that after we'd finished, when I took the
food mixer back to Washibe, I stopped off at home to wash my face in
ice-cold water. A shower would have been better, but someone might have
noticed I'd been gone for rather longer than I should have been...
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The final day of the Summer Mini English School- cooking. The recipes
are fairly straightforward- I've done them even with Elementary School
students before- so there was no real problem there, but half of the
boys had no real interest in participating at all, so I had to tell them
to do everything, and moreover I had to repeat myself several times for
each instruction, because they weren't paying attention. And I
hate having to repeat myself because people aren't paying
attention!
Anyway, apart from one boy trying to wedge a bowl into the
fridge without thinking and overturning a bowl of lemonade, everything
turned out well, and the morning was enjoyable. Having to make sure that
one of the groups did what they'd been told (the girls, and one of the
groups of boys, worked splendidly, though) meant that we took longer
than the Elementary School children take, though! Clearing up, too, was
a long, painful, drawn out affair- some of the boys (the 'bad' group)
openly ignored what I was asking them to do, until I made it clear to
them that nobody was leaving until the room was tidied to my
satisfaction.
On the whole, though, I think the children enjoyed the three days of
English and the day of cooking- Tabuchi-kun even suggested we do the
same sort of course again at Christmas! What's more, most of them said
that they thought the food we made was tasty (even though they only ate
about half of what we'd made), which is another step on the way to
combating the 'British food is rubbish' image that's prevalent here...
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© Copyright 2003 Nathan Duckworth.
Updated: 8/1/03; 8:32:44 pm.
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