Thursday is an easy day for me – I really look forward to Thursdays. All of my classes are over by 11:30 a.m., and then I’m free to do whatever I want. In my first year class today I was having a conversation with a couple of the students before the class started. One student was trying to explain to me that another teacher had false teeth. I couldn’t understand her explanation in Japanese, so she went to get a dictionary, looked up the word, and then showed me the entry that read “false teeth”.
I pretended to look confused, and then look closely at her mouth and told her in Japanese, “They look real!”. Finally, a joke that worked! She and her friend literally fell on the floor laughing so hard. Mr. Oshita came in to help me teach the class and was wondering what the heck was going on with these two girls rolling around on the cold floor laughing hysterically.
Teachers have started to figure out that I have a cellphone now, and so I’ve been passing around my e-mail address as people ask for it. Mr. Hayashi has it now, so once he figures out how to save it, I should be getting messages from him now and then. That should be interesting.
After school Mr. Komuri gave me a ride home in his car, and we chatted in English on the way back. Next week he and the rest of the second year teachers will be going on a school trip to Hokkaido with all the second year students. He’s getting all packed and prepared. It sounds like they’ll have lots of fun.
Once I got home I assessed my refrigerator and decided to make some homemade ramen. The trick to good ramen is the broth. I’m still not sure how they do it, but this time I came pretty close. I didn’t have any meat to put in, so I dug around and found a couple of pieces of SPAM that I had leftover from the SPAM and eggs I made when Kuniko was here.
SPAM ramen. I’m sure somebody has done it before, but I felt truly transcontinental as I used chopsticks to slurp up the steaming noodles along with bite-sized chunks of SPAM. It was really good.
