Today's lunch was a highlight of the day.
Chicken with a sesame apple sauce that is SO delicious!
Potato salad-- which wasn't made with pasty mayo. I don't usually like potato salad, but I like the ones we have for school lunch. Today's included cucumbers, carrots, corn, and cheese cubes. I know it sounds strange, but it's actually really good.
Vegetable soup-- which is amazingly sweet. Maekawa San tells me it's just the natural sweetness of the vegetables that makes the broth sweet...but it's hard for me to believe her. ;) There was also sliced pork in the soup.
米粉 (Komeko) Bread-- which is bread made from rice flour, and blueberry jam. (Can you see the jam packet just barely showing behind my plate?)
And milk.
Besides lunch, another highlight of the day was getting to laugh a lot with the 7th graders this afternoon during 5th and 6th periods and also during cleaning time after that. A really sweet kid named Naoya just smiles the most adorable smile all the time...which totally makes me smile. Sometimes, like today during 6th period, Naoya smiles so much it seems like he's about to laugh, which makes me laugh. He sits right in the front of the class, where I was standing today while Ikeda Sensei was giving directions. I had to totally fight the urge to laugh out loud during class. Actually, now that I think about it...I think I may have laughed out loud. Ryo, who sits behind Naoya said, 'What are you guys laughing about?!' ;D
In Japanese elementary and jr. high schools all students and teachers eat school lunch (kyushoku) every day. I am SO fortunate to have the best school dietitian EVER at my jr. high, so I get really great lunches!! (most days. ;) i mean, i am a seafood hater living in Japan, so there are bound to be some lunches i'd prefer not to have...but most of the time i really like what Maekawa San (前川さん)
and the rest of the kitchen staff make.) I get to try so many different foods that aren't served in restaurants or that I wouldn't know to order, even if they were. A lot of our lunches are "home cooking" style Japanese food, rather than just the very traditional foods that most restaurants have. Before coming to Japan and being served the wonder that is kyushoku, I wouldn't have imagined most of these foods when thinking about "Japanese food". So, I guess other Americans wouldn't think of these as "Japanese food" either. That's why I decided that I'd post a picture of school lunch every day this week. I hope you enjoy seeing the variety. In addition to Japanese food, we also have Korean, Chinese, Indian, Italian, and Western (??).
I have been thinking about doing this for a couple weeks but kept forgetting, so I was really excited to check the lunch menu this morning to find out what today's lunch was! I could NOT believe what I saw...ししゃも (shishamo) and わかめご飯 (wakame gohan). Ogh...sick!!! These are the two foods I dislike more than anything else! UNbelievable! What a way to start this week of blogging school lunch. Well, you get what you get.
So, here it is...いただきます:
Shishamo [also known as "the most disgusting food in the world"]-- long, slender fish, which are eaten whole-- including the head. Although it's strange to just bite off the head of a fish, eyes and all, and eat it, that's not at all the worst part of shishamo. Other than the head and the little, crispy tail, the rest of the fish is full of tiny white eggs. Just thinking of the inside of a shishamo makes me feel sick. I wanted to take a picture of the inside of the fish so you could see it, but that would have required me biting the fish open. I was not about to do that! I gave them both away to Nakazatomi Sensei, and I thought it might be rude to ask him if I could take a picture after he'd taken a bite. So...check out this link. Really though, shishamo is even worse than the picture makes it look.Wakame gohan-- rice with wakame seaweed and tiny, clear fish (including heads and eyes) mixed in.
Soup with tofu, spinach, celery, wakame, and carrots.
Cabbage and sprout salad with almond dressing (love this dressing!)
A mikan orange-- which I think is the same as a Clementine. ??
And milk, which we have every day.
I didn't eat much of this meal, so I'm pretty hungry now...time for dinner! Curry. yumm! Check back tomorrow for what will most definitely be a better lunch.
Yesterday was Culture Day in Japan. It's one of many mid-week national holidays that I have come to love. Although it's nice that at home the random holidays are observed on Mondays so we can have 3-day weekends, I think I like the mid-week holidays better. They make the whole week more exciting, and the work week seems shorter. While riding my bike in the beautiful sunny, fall morning yesterday, I felt really excited and thought to myself that I was going to have an adventure. Then I chuckled as I realized that getting a haircut by myself for the first time is what I had just thought of as "an adventure". :D HA! Soo weird...but I really was excited. For more than a year I never went to a salon here. I just waited until I went home on breaks to get my hair cut. The thought of going to a Japanese stylist was not an option in my mind. They've rarely seen hair like mine, let alone cut it! Then, several months ago, for some reason my Japanese teacher, Yamamoto San (山本 さん), randomly suggested that I go to her stylist. She could barely stifle her laughter as she pled with me, "Pleease, Mya! It will be a good Japanese experience!" I knew it would be an experience, but I didn't think "good" belonged in that sentence. Finally my getting-too-long hair and Yamamoto San's persistence ("My stylist just moved back from Tokyo...he's probably done foreigners' hair before.", "He has good technique."...) made me cave. I agreed to go to the salon with her. I sat in the stylist's chair, nervous and barely able to breathe, even though before going I had looked up many words in the dictionary, drawn a diagram of what shape I did not want and what I did want, and explained all of it to Yamamoto San. The stylist seemed nervous too...'Oh great!' (Maybe it was because I looked panicked and wasn't breathing.) In the end, he did a good job, and I've been back since. But yesterday was the first time I made the appointment myself and went by myself without Yamamoto San there to help me explain what I wanted. It worked out well, and I really like my haircut...even though it is 2-3 inches shorter than I said I wanted! Adventure!
In the afternoon I was walking up to the train station and passed a man who directs traffic out of a busy parking garage. I greeted him with a single word, 「こんにちは」 / "konnichiwa", to which he enthusiastically replied, 「日本語上手いね!!」 / "Your Japanese is really good!!" No Culture Day in Japan would be complete without a Japanese person giving excessive praise for a foreigner's minimal language ability!
