WOO HOO Office Trips!!!

People in America wear t-shirts with Chinese or Japanese words whose meanings they don't know on them. So what do Japanese people do? They wear stuff with English and French gibberish on them. i.e. One of the teachers at my new JHS wore a polo style shirt with "Elle Homme" on the collar and pocket. What is "Elle Homme" you ask? Directly translated from French to English it's "She Man"...Enough said. And then there are the food labels. Vanilla Cream Sand Cookies??? I'm sure they meant Sandwich Cookies, but Sand Cookies just makes them ten times less appealing!
Thursday night, I went to my first taiko (Japanese drumming) lesson. It's so funny how people make things look easy! That stuff is HARD WORK! The form is very precise. I really enjoyed myself. Sore arms, throbbing quads, and three blisters later I knew that it's what I want to get good at while in Japan. All the students kept coming by to compliment me and tell me to repeat a drum pattern after them. Even the little ones! I seriously doubt that my attempt at drumming was really all that good.
Friday evening, everyone who works at the board of education (including us, the foreigners) loaded up on a chartered bus for our "Friendship Trip" to Asakura City. What a great way to keep morale high in the office. They really rolled out the red carpet. When we arrived at the hotel, we promptly hit the onsen, hot spring bath. We went to the one outside. I think it was really an ofuro because the water source is a tap and not a hot spring but onsen is the general name. I LOVE ONSENS! The office party was really nice. Everyone wore the yukata that the hotel provided for post-onsen lounging. So it was something between a traditional Japanese meal and a pajama party! We all looked so cute in our matching digs! The meal was a sight to behold. So, behold. Here's a test of how keen your eyes are. Can you figure out what's what? I'll help you out. From the bottom right to the bottom left there are a bunch of small bowls. R to L: water/iced tea/beer glass, really small glass for hot sake (turned upside down), soy sauce, grape sake (I think...it smelled like grape soda but didn't taste like it), menu, thinly sliced seasoned sheets of tofu, king crab legs and dipping sauce, and a warm cloth for cleaning my hands. On the big plate that's kinda in the middle there was Basashi, sashimi-ed (RAW and thinly sliced) horse meat on raw onions. Yes, HORSE MEAT! It was good and surprisingly soft like raw fish. At the top R to L: steak sauce, personal griddle, raw steak and veggies to be cooked on the griddle, raw squid, a personal shabu shabu (boiling broth into which meat and veggies are put, you swish them around until their done) hot pot for cooking the squid, and dipping sauce. Here's a picture of the horse meat. There were a number of other dishes. Roasted salt cured fish, some little omelet thingy, assorted sashimi (raw fish), rice porridge, and fruit for dessert.

There's no law against drinking outside on the street (unless you're on a bike or in a car) and surprise surprise there's no law against drinking in a chartered bus either! The beer was flowing before the bus door even closed! And the they hit the off button on their restraint mechanism once again. By the time we got to the hotel (1 hr 30 min later), they were already on the road to being gone. So, it didn't help that the office party/dinner and the Karaoke session that followed was all-you-can-drink...FOR FREE!!! I did try some hot sake (a cup that held about 2 tablespoons, see picture on the right), but man they were throwing them back! As a result, one of the guys in my program disappeared in the middle of Karaoke (he probably bowing to his porcelain alter) and I'm not sure what the whole rest of the office thinks the other woman in my program responding to the advances of one of the younger MARRIED teachers who works at the board of education!!! He had the nerve to stop by the room after everything was over so she decided to ask our other roommates if it was ok for them to come in. DUH, NO!!! There were 3 or 4 to a room with 3 beds and a futon. One of our roommates is around 30/35 and the other is around 40/50. So the older woman was like, "No, sleeping." So I ran over and gave her the thumbs up. Later on, my fellow program member went out into the hallway with him and one of the males in my program. UMM! Come to find out, she went to a room of about 10 drunk/still drinking men from the office. They gave her a drink and one of the men from our program made some reference to how she should forget about her boyfriend. WHAT?! The next morning she had the nerve to say, "Oh, he gets like that when he's drunk. He'll probably just come and apologize later today." I said, "OH, UH UH!" So she asked what should she do. WHAT?! I told her that I would give him a piece of my mind so he'd know not to let it happen again and that I would avoid situations like that. I don't know if that's what she did but she and the guy from our program were cool again by the end of the day.
All of the people who didn't go to play golf came back to the bus hung over. I can only imagine how badly the golf folks were playing with all that alcohol still in their systems. So, on the bus I took pictures hahaha! And guess where we went sightseeing... an old city, a beer brewery, and a shochu distillery!!! You can only imagine how bored I was. If you can't, then see the picture to the left. It sums up how I felt about the entire day's "sightseeing"...Aside from not understanding the tours, I don't drink, plus beer and shochu are the WORST! So, during the beer tasting/drinking (it was unlimited) session I sipped my iced tea and looked at my co-workers like "Y'all are some alcoholics!" That's my cup in the foreground (this camera is the greatest!!!) I wonder if they serve this particular kind of tea to keep the prudes (like me) from looking like wimps. Minus the head and the tall glass, it looks exactly like the beer...hmmm.

Dave Chapelle was right in "Killing Them Softly" when he said that sometimes racist stuff happens to you and you don't even get mad because it's like you're in a movie and all you can say is, "Wow, that was racist." Remember the guy who asked me if I was looking at my family when I was watching the Outkast video? Well he struck again! At the office party in one of the grand tatami rooms of the hotel we all kinda congregated in groups after the main courses were served. After a few minutes everyone would rotate groups. When I made my way around to his group, he asked me if I ran fast. I tilted my head to the side and made a puzzled face. Then, I said in Japanese, "No, I hate running!" And guess what his ignorant tail said! "Oh, can't Black people run fast?" I said, "No." So he asks, "Slow?" And I said no again and explained that some Japanese people run fast and some don't so the same goes for Black people. With a look of surprise on his face he said, "Really? The Japanese image of Blacks is that they run fast. So, what do you like doing?" Well y'all I never thought I would have to refrain from telling someone about my love for dance, but I couldn't bring myself to say it because I didn't want to say anything that could possibly feed his ignorance. So, I said "Swimming. I like swimming." Then he says, "Oh, and?" So, I replied with, "That's all." Once again either he's ignorant as they come or he's mean and a good actor! I couldn't believe that he would say something like that. Ok, yes I could but who'da thunk??? It's one of those things that doesn't surprise you, but you still don't expect it!

I almost forgot to mention that apparently it's a national law that only old men are allowed to hit on Tiffany! First the man in the hardware store, another old man kept raising his eyebrows at me in the train like "hey", and yesterday the man who delivered my new modem asked me if I had a boyfriend!!! Not normal like most people ask, but with a tone suggesting that he had more questions whose answers would require me to yell all kinds of bad words in English! I told him that I do have a boyfriend and he lives in Tokyo. When he started asking me questions, like how old I am, I acted like I didn't understand and started putting stuff away in the box that he was supposed to take with him. When I closed my front door, I was extra forceful with the lock so that he could undoubtedly hear me locking the door. YUCK!!!