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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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Thursday, December 5, 2002 |
A completely random thought. Do dogs slurp when they eat ramen?
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 J-List
Cities in Hiroshima Prefecture
- Hiroshima
- Kure
- Takehara
- Mihara
- Onomichi
- Innoshima
- Fukuyama
- Fuchu
- Miyoshi
- Shobara
- Otake
- Higashi-Hiroshima
- Hatsukaichi
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There are many ways of showing affection. And cabbage isn't one of them.
Unfortunately, the lady in Romantei, the little yakiniku shop in Washibe, doesn't seem to realise this. Her kindness and friendliness isn't in doubt; it's just that she always tries to be friendly by means of various random root vegetables. And cabbage, of course...
Wendy and I went to Romantei this evening, and it was the same as ever. I'm sure that nobody else who orders chicken katsu gets three-quarters of a plateful of cabbage, shredded for disguise, of course, but cabbage all the same. Anyway, as I finished, the lady came with more water, and when I said I was fine, she said, 'No, have some more, because I've got dessert for you.' Ominous. The dessert turned out to be four shrivelled, ugly, slightly hairy sweet potatoes.
Now, let it be said at this point that I will never understand how anyone could regard as food any vegetable as fiendishly difficult to peel as a hot sweet potato. The potato might be as long as a chopstick, but by the time you've peeled it, all that's remaining is a tiny little orange blob- about the size of a fingernail or so. Whoever said that celery was the only vegetable with negative calories was wrong: sweet potatoes must take more energy to peel than they contain when you eat what's left of them! Anyway, I finally managed to wrestle the skin from my two potatoes, to find... slimy, slicky orange lumps, strangely (and slightly unsettlingly) like some sort of primeval embryo. There was even a line of bluish bumps (a primitive backbone?) along one side of the potato...
Next came green tea. I like green tea, don't get me wrong, but in Romantei tea is always a dangerous matter. I'm sure that the lady in this yakiniku-ya must have broken some fundamental law of physics; there's no way otherwise that she could get the water so scaldingly, skin-strippingly hot! I had some water left, so I managed to cool the tea to a drinkable temperature by pouring the water into the molten tea... but even this is fraught with danger. You see, not only is 'Mrs. Romantei' a cabbage fanatic, she also has the eyes of a hawk (we're talking about someone who can spot an edible root at 500 yards, here!), and so the only safe time to do the tea-cooling procedure is when she's in the kitchen. If she's in the main room, you're never safe; it might seem that she's occupied, that she's looking the other way, but she sees everything.
In the end, we only got the sweet potatoes and the tea, but this was probably because the second Wendy finished her (purple!) potato, we paid and left. In Romantei, linger too long and there's always the danger of a post-dessert dessert...
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Tried again to complete my newsletter article. Failed again to complete my newsletter article.
I'll do it tonight at home. I'll have to. Anyway, I work better when there's a deadline looming large...
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An unusual lesson in Kirikushi Elementary School today. The sixth-years held what they called a 'Kare-koryukai'- a Curry Exchange Party. A few children gave an explanation to the class of the history of curry in Japan, and then I spoke briefly about curry in Britain. Afterwards, though, was basically a cookery lesson, where some of the children made Japanese curry, and others made English curry with me (some children, slightly unconnectedly, made fruit salad with yoghurt...). I did my standard, tried-and-tested chicken balti recipe, which fascinated the children, firstly because of the amount of evaporated milk used, and secondly because it doesn't look like curry until the last few minutes of cooking.
After we'd made the curries (and, of course, the fruit salad- apparently, the connection was that Indian people sometimes eat yoghurt-based food with curry...) we ate them in place of school lunch, in the sixth-years' classroom, which had been decorated for the occasion. We had a bowl of each curry, so that the children could compare them, and after lunch each of children stood up and gave their opinion. Some of the children liked the English curry better than the Japanese; some were the opposite; some children, I suspect, gave the answer they thought I'd want to hear. As I pointed out in my summing up, though, the lesson wasn't really a contest where one curry had to be better than the other, but rather an opportunity to make and taste non-Japanese food. I think it was a great success; the children were interested and curious, and (of course, in Kirikushi) well-behaved, and they'd planned the whole event excellently. In addition, it was good to be able to do something a little less formal than a classroom lesson with the children- when the children are as well-behaved as these sixth-years, they respond so well. Even the washing up was done well (although, in my group, we had to threaten one boy with drinking washing-up liquid if he didn't do his share...)! I'll be sad to see these children graduate in March.
I also took the third-years for one lesson, in which we played Go Fish!. Most of the children have remembered the questions and answers for the game almost perfectly now, so after making them practice once or twice, I let them play the game for the whole lesson, and just wandered round, listening in on each of the four groups. Some of the children try to get away without using the English sentences if they think I'm not listening...!
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© Copyright 2003 Nathan Duckworth.
Updated: 20/1/03; 2:15:59 pm.
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