13 07 2004
Blood-type dominoes and 117kg melons
It's Tuesday. I'm sitting in my apartment with the air conditioner on full blast, and the soothing sounds of the washing machine in the background. I'm comfortable. Usually Tuesday is my longest day at work - from around 12 until 9, with a lunch break. Today, though, it's a day off, because I had to work over the weekend. There was another summer party on Sunday. I'm getting into the groove of teaching kids, and my voice has become much louder than it used to be. When I first got here and tried elevating my voice, it'd hurt my throat, but now I can yell out vocabulary or praise with very little effort. It's not so much a discipline technique as a way of keeping their attention - getting the students to yell words back at me when I yell at them tends to be more fun. Sometimes I'll whisper or speak in a funny voice just to keep them on their toes. Speaking of body parts, my legs and shoulders are sore again, from the workout I got over the weekend. By the end of these summer parties I'm going to be pretty fit indeed. Well, if I can consistently eat well, anyway. Most of the time I buy healthy food - sushi, rice-based bentos, etc, but sometimes I buy a pile of unhealthy things just to give me something to do after work. Even though I've been going out a lot, there's still the odd day where I go home after work, and the lack of internet means the only thing to do when I get home is to watch TV I can only barely follow, or study. Eating (and cooking) is a way of combatting the boredom. All that will change tomorrow, though - finally the internet company is ready and they're coming around tomorrow morning to install the line. I'm so happy. Japanese TV has its ups and downs much like TV at home. The prime time slots generally have something interesting worth watching, and there's a bunch of dramas on during the day to cater to all the housewives here. To their credit the dramas are better than the "bold and the beautiful" trash that they play back home. I've accumulated a few amusing shows to recant over the last week or two, so without further adieu: One of them that was on a few days ago involved a boy and a girl sitting at Chinese restaurant. They're given a fortune cookie which says something to the effect of "if you break up, something bad will happen". Invariably they end up having an argument and the girl rides home in tears. Up until this point the drama had been perfectly normal, but suddenly she swerves out of the way of some passing animal, and her bike (with her still on it) catapults over a bridge and into the water below. When she wakes up, she's shrunk to the size of a matchbox. It was a little bizarre, but fun. Then there was the taiyaki variety show. Taiyaki is a thing made out of batter and filling, and pressed into the shape of a fish. The batter is roughly equivalent to fritter mixture back home. On this show a bunch of panelists took turns suggesting different types of fillings to try, and once the taiyaki was cooked they'd all sit down and try it - eliciting responses such as "umai!" (yum!), "atsui!" (hot! (it'd just been cooked)), or sour faces for the bad tasting ones. Some of the ingredients they tried were tomatoes (good), grapefruit (bad), rice (so/so), some sort of salty uncooked sea creature (horrible), and so on. Then there was this show that was showcasing some of the local food produce - things like pineapples, some sort of interesting root which was purple on the inside, papayas, etc. But first a bit of cultural background: Japanese love their melons. Watermelons, canterlope, etc - melons are loved by many people here. And they're really expensive. For an average sized melon that you could buy back home, you'll probably have to pay about $10-15. And good melons are often much more expensive - and are often given as gifts. It's not unusual to see a good melon in a box on sale for $30 or $50, and in rare cases even $100 or $200. Anyway, on this show they had this locally grown melon which was 117 kg. It was huge. Then there was the show which goes around interviewing "bimbo"s. "bimbo" in Japanese means poor (as in financially struggling). This show visits people in their homes and enquires about how much they spend in a month, and looks around their house to see what interesting things they can find. Most of the people they interview are students, so it's not a malicious stab at the lower-class so much as a "let's make fun of the students" affair. Actually, 90% of Japanese identify themselves as "middle class", so there's not so much of a lower-class as in other countries. There's an interesting variety of people on the show. One girl had stuck a stick through a tissue box and put a roll of toilet paper inside, so she had a makeshift box of tissues. Her apartment was an absolute wreck, and the people interviewing her commented on how astonished they were that such a pretty girl could live like that. Then there was the guy who lived in an apartment about the size of our laundry back home. The interviewers dug around his kitchen and discovered .. cat food. The guy living in the apartment obligingly made a sandwich with some and took and bite, and then gave the two interviewers the chance to try it. The first interviewer cautiously took a bite and a look of great confusion spread across his face. After a while he finally muttered: "umaiiii!" (yummmy!). The other interviewer was equally surprised. Then there was the guy who served the interviewers some water out of some glass jars, and then cooked his special dish: rice and chilli rice. He'd cooked up a large batch of rice, divided it into half, and then dumped a large amount of paprika into one of the halves. He then served the dish up in two separate plates. The interviewer took a bite and then expressed in a mild panic that it was too spicy! The bimbo ushered him to the unadorned bowl of rice to correct the problem. Another cultural preface before the next show. A large number of Japanese people attribute a person's personality to their blood type. The blood type is seen as having similar properties as horoscopes back home, but there seems to be a more widespread belief in the blood type thing here than in horoscopes back home. On a lot of dating agency applications one of the important parts to fill out is your blood type. I've been given a few strange looks when people asked me about my blood type, because I've actually forgotten what it is. Mum, help me out here! Anyway, there was this show on a few days ago that had divided the kids up into small groups that shared the some blood type, and then the kids were segregated in their group and told to play with some dominoes. Some of the groups were more constructive than others, some preferring to knock things down more quickly. From this observation, the show (with the help of some "doctors") drew conclusions about the effects the kids blood type had on their ability to play.