Writing

I've written this before, and I'll say it again now. Happiness is not a good author, so I may be brief. I also may have prematurely spoken cuz this might get long. Also I didn't think about love poems.

Well, I found in my journal at least that I tend to not write when I'm feeling for the most part satisfied with life and my day to day activities. Maybe this will be good practice for me to write consistently so that I can learn to portray more than just the "emo" spectrum of emotion. So is that the "tion" spectrum?

Life is good and I'm feeling tion.

Today I signed Sarah up for soba for my lunch. The other week I had signed up for soba only to return from teaching a class to find my soba half digested by Sarah. I was like, "Oh, did you sign up for soba today?" And she was like, "....yeah....wait...." Then we went to the kitchen and looked at the list. I had signed up for soba for myself for that day, while Sarah had signed up Watanabe-sensei for the following day, and then ate my lunch. "Sa-ryo!"

So to make up for it Sarah said I could sign her up for soba some day and then eat that lunch. And she quickly erased Watanabe's soba star before they put in the orders for the next day. It wasn't until a few weeks ago that I realized I could order "special" obentos for lunch. The regular ones are quite delicious and facinating as you can probably tell from my copious amounts of obento photographs. Soba is one such special choice. Now that I finally got to try some, I will tell you about my experience.

Soba is a type of noodle. Don't ask me how it's made or even what it's made of, because I don't know. I often will eat yakisoba which is soba fried along with some kind of sauce and lettuce, but just plain soba usually comes cold. In my obento box were 7 little compartments, each with a small pile of soba loosely bound together by its own sticky nature. They appeared slightly larger than bite size; however, each noodle was difficult to sever entirely from the pack using only chopsticks. I was having a bit of a time with the first couple of piles, especially when it came to the part where I had to dip the noodles in a pool of (water and soy sauce and vinegar? Actually, I'm not sure. Sarah is telling me right now that you'll often find that each particular food in Japan comes with its own "sauce." She says that they're pretty much all made up of the same ingredients in different proportions.) Also in this pool I had cracked a tiny speckled egg raw and stirred it up. So between the noodles falling all over the place, the sauce splashing over my desk, and the egg, I decided it was a good time to ask my kyoto-sensei how I was to eat this mess.

He started rattling off Japanese (I think he was showing off) of which I caught not a word. Noticing my blank stare he called over one of the English teachers to translate. Through the translation I learned that I was supposed to eat the whole thing in one bite and that I had to make slurping noises to get the last bits of noodle that were hanging down over my plate up into my mouth. The command for "make slurping noises" is "zuuzuu shimasu" (I asked Kenmotsu-sensei for the spelling) and is just one of the thousands of Japanese onomatopoeia. I must have heard kyoto sensei tell me to "zuuzuu" 4 or 5 times. He then added that if I wanted to do it the "European" way then I could cut it in half and make no noises. But to be fully Japanese, I must take it all in one bite and zuuzuu.

So my meal was over in 7 bites basically leaving a rumbling tummy for the rest of the afternoon. Next time I order soba (if there is a next time), I won't be too gutted if Sarah eats it. :-)