Well, I mentioned the zoo in my last entry, so I might as well explain what I was doing there.
Like I said, we went there with the 大川s (that's "Ōkawa" for people who don't speak moon language). Mrs. 大川 is a P.E. teacher at Chiyoda High School with
schoolpsychnerd. Her husband is also a teacher, as it turned out, though of Japanese. Anyway, we went to the Asa Zoo, which is Hiroshima's somewhat-small zoo. It was raining the whole day, but I bought new umbrellas for
schoolpsychnerd and I, so it wasn't too bad. The main interesting part was talking to the 大川s' children. They had three: Ryoutarou, Hinata, and Kanata. Respectively, 8 years old, 5 years old, and 3 years old. Kanata obviously didn't say much, But both Ryou-chan and Hina-chan were able to talk to me, and I to them, with varying degrees of success. They're pretty good at English for their age--Ryou-chan could ask us our names, how old we are, our favorite colors and fruits, count to a hundred and tell us all those answers himself, and while Hina-chan lagged a bit behind, she was still better than some of the students I taught.
We did feel a bit bad, because they sprung a dinner on us without warning (
schoolpsychnerd was under the impression that it was just going to be a visit to the zoo), which meant we went to their house without a house gift, and what's worse, they gave us one after making us dinner and buying a bottle of booze for me. That's massive 義理 we owe towards them, then, and I'm not sure we have a chance to repay it, since 大川さん is being transferred this year. Though we have her e-mail, so hopefully we are actually able to invite them over for dinner. We told them we'd make Mexican food for them. It's a popular choice, since it's not nearly as common in Japan as it is in America.
They made 手巻 for dinner, which, now that we've seen how it's made, we can buy supplies for to make ourselves pretty easily. The only difficult might be finding sashimi-grade fish in the States, since there's no standard for what exactly constitutes "sashimi-grade," but I'm sure we can figure it out. The meal also made me realize why the amount of water we're supposed to add to rice is so high. When it's just rice in a bowl I prefer it to be less glutinous, so to speak, but when it's part of 手巻 the stickiness really helps things out.
Someday I'm going to write a whole entry in Japanese, just to see if I can. I'm not sure if I'll make it private or not, or whether it matters in the end.
Maybe listening to 島唄 wasn't the best idea.
Like I said, we went there with the 大川s (that's "Ōkawa" for people who don't speak moon language). Mrs. 大川 is a P.E. teacher at Chiyoda High School with
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We did feel a bit bad, because they sprung a dinner on us without warning (
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They made 手巻 for dinner, which, now that we've seen how it's made, we can buy supplies for to make ourselves pretty easily. The only difficult might be finding sashimi-grade fish in the States, since there's no standard for what exactly constitutes "sashimi-grade," but I'm sure we can figure it out. The meal also made me realize why the amount of water we're supposed to add to rice is so high. When it's just rice in a bowl I prefer it to be less glutinous, so to speak, but when it's part of 手巻 the stickiness really helps things out.
Someday I'm going to write a whole entry in Japanese, just to see if I can. I'm not sure if I'll make it private or not, or whether it matters in the end.
Maybe listening to 島唄 wasn't the best idea.