New Friends

For the next week or so the Board of Education has me working from home, planning lessons and crafting props. It is a pretty sweet deal but, it must be said, excruciatingly dull. So Mogi-san showed me where the library was, so I can at least change the atmosphere once in a while. I met the staff and they were all extremely friendly (my mouth hurt afterward from smiling too much); the boss tried to set me up with a mortified single employee and mentioned that the way they say my last name, "Hen-daah" sounds exactly like the phrase, "Hen da" (she's strange). Everybody laughed, and I prided myself on the fact that I needed no translation for that part of the conversation. I may not know how to pay my own utility bills, but at least I know when I'm being teased!

In the library yard, there were a bunch of oddly-shaped benches. Mogi-san told me they're for exercise; doing push-ups and back-bends, etc. I wonder if there are many people who enjoy doing back-bends over a cold, wooden bench--but then again, these are the same people who sleep on the ground and use squat toilets, so I suppose comfort isn't a huge priority.

The next day, after I'd finished work and settled down to watch Terminator and The Magnificent Seven (what's more American than that, I ask you?), I got a call from Terumi, one of the workers at the library. She invited me out to dinner with her friends, Shizuka and Yuriko, all of whom speak a little English. They spoke the perfect amount, as it turned out: they got to practice English while I got to practice Japanese, with no crippling communication issues. At the restaurant, they kindly ordered all the courses so I didn't have to worry about deciphering the menu at all. We ate a salad with crunchy white things on top, which I assumed to be noodles until I noticed that they had eyes. They were actually very tiny, white fish that are often used as a topping here. I braved onward, determined not to offend anyone, but it was especially difficult when one of the heads fell of the plate and lay right in front of me, gazing up with glassy indignation.

The girls were all very curious about American food and asked if I knew how to cook, and when I said yes, they jumped on the opportunity to ask me to teach them how to make something they'd been longing for: oatmeal cookies. Apparently they tried to make them with just oatmeal, flour, and oil--a little bland, they told me. I promised to make some with them, and of course now the only trick is finding oatmeal out here...