A Few Small Notes

Just a couple quick things combined into a single blog entry.
1). The newspaper article I talked about previously was printed in the Chu-Nichi Shimbun on Monday February 6. It was buried in the back pages, but it was a decently sized article, half a page with two pictures: One class picture, and one picture of me sitting at the computer pretending to e-mail Israel. My Japanese co-workers were surprised at how big the article was, so I guess it’s unusual to give that much space to something so mundane.

I’m still somewhat scratching my head as to why it became an article in the first place. I mean, it’s not a school wide exchange. It’s just the elective class. No more than 19 students. And we only exchange letters about once a month.

I think the journalist might have been a bit desperate for ideas. But my Japanese tutor suggested to me that the paper might have been interested because of the new Spielberg movie “Munich”, which in Japan opened the same week as the article. In Japan lots of schools have pen-pal exchanges with America or Australia, but not a lot with Israel.

2. On Wednesday February 8th, the school lunch made a nod towards internationalization with American food. The head nutritionist had long ago asked me for an American recipe. I asked my mom, and she e-mailed me a recipe for Macaroni and Cheese with Tomato soup.

Thus followed weeks of answering the nutritionists questions about whether tomato soup was supposed to taste sweet or sour, and helping her convert the recipe into metric measurements. And then it was massed produced with the kids, complete with a little trivia about Michigan and Grand Rapids that went with the daily lunch announcements.

It tasted pretty good. It’s hard to do gourmet cooking when you’re mass-producing for hundreds of kids, but I thought she did all right on it.

I should note briefly I have mixed feelings on school lunch. On one hand it’s a blessing. It’s less than $2 a day, and I would never be able to feed myself that cheaply. And it’s reasonably healthy, and, given my eating habits, I can’t imagine what my body would be like if I had been responsibly for my own lunch every day.

On the other hand, the sticky rice and the boiled vegetables really sit in my stomach and make me feel groggy all afternoon. I have a hard time teaching in the afternoon, or really doing much of anything. Sometimes I overdose on coffee to try and balance out, but the school coffee is just a black sludge that only makes me feel worse.

The kids feel it also. 5th period everyone is asleep at their desks. They might as well just make it nap time because no serious studying ever gets done.

Link of the Day
I don't always agree with my sister (she's a Bush supporter) , but I agree with this.