Free Champagne

Today at 12.30pm New Zealand time, my Uncle got married. I am pissed because this is only the second wedding we've ever had in my family that I can remember. The first was when I was about 12 or so, my younger sister got to be a flowergirl. I was at that horrible limbo age, too old to be a flowergirl but too young to drink the free champagne. They are having the wedding today at a really nice hotel next to the ocean where the lucky couple will spend two weeks on honeymoon. My Uncle is my mother's sisters husband. Annie died a few years back now, it's a bit weird seeing him marry someone else, but hey, you either sink or swim in life and everybody needs somebody. I'm pleased for them and hope they'll be happy together. I raise my mug of tea to you, in my pajamas, here in Hagi :)

The Handicapped Fudge Experience

If you know me, you know I am obsessed with cooking. I have to make the base of the pizza as well as the topping. I have to have all the ingredients for carrot cake with cream cheese icing in the house at all times. A plot is also underway to make the world's best Hot Cross Buns at Easter.
I have found cakes a very easy and effective way of crossing the language barrier. You take baking into the staff room and you are suddenly a superstar and there's a talking point.
The cooking teacher invited me to hang out with the handicapped kids (until then I didn't even know there were any at my school, is it that I am completely clueless or is my school keeping them eugenics-style out of sight out of mind...) to make mochi, Japanese New Year's gooey cakes made from rice. Went fine, she wanted to reciprocate by having me come in and teach the Chocolate Fudge recipe from the good ol' Kiwi favourite, the Edmond's cookbook. Straightforward you are thinking, well think again. It was farcical to say the least.
I had imagined that I would stand up the front, get the kids to help me measure and put the ingredients into the pot and show them how to make a batch of fudge. Anyone knows, when you are cooking sugar you have to be careful to boil it for the right length of time, but not burn it. However, there were 6 kids, each with a pot. The teachers didn't want me to demonstrate. They got each kids to measure out the sugar and cocoa on a large piece of paper(???) and then carry it precariously over to their workbench and carefully into the pot. Instead of just measuring the stuff straight into the pot....
I digress. It got worse. The kids were in a row with their pots on the gas stove, each stirring madly (think Rain Man) with their fudge boiling at various temperatures. I meanwhile ran up and down the gauntlet with a bottle of vanilla essence trying to adjust temperatures and keep an eye on how ready the fudge was. Because if you don't boil it long enough, it won't set. If you boil it for too long, the sugar will seize in the pot. Which is what happened to 5 out of 6 of the pots. The other pot got burnt, so I transferred the fudge out at lightening pace into another clean pot, at which point that fudge also seized up. The kids scraped crumbly light brown, crappy tasting fugde out of the pots and into the trays which should have been filled with buttery goodness. What could I say. I was embarrassed but frustrated and a little angry. The kids however didn't seem to mind and compulsively chowed down handfuls of the horrible stuff (again think Rain Main). It was great to have such enthusiastic kids, I started having fantasies about starting all over again - but this time I would lock the 2 teachers into a mesh cage in a corner of the cooking room.
Today taught me a really important thing. Sometimes the language barrier isn't the problem, it's the cultural barrier. I grew up with a Mum that showed me from a really young age how to whip stuff up in the kitchen, and it wasn't a big deal. But I don't really think they have that culture here of baking all the time at home. So they just didn't know how to go about a recipe written from a Kiwi perspective. We all have that need to interpret everything into our own culture. Our unfortunate experiment today showed that is not always a good idea.
So my advice to you friends, if it's fudge and it's handicapped and it's Japan - don't do it.

Rosie the Town Planner

As many (or none, if you are reading this from outside of Yamaguchi) of you know, in March there is a merger between Hagi city and all the little outlying towns around Hagi to make one big super-sized Hagi region. Something about government reforms to streamline bureaucracy etc. So anyway, I was called to the Board of Ed this avo, my supervisor Obane-san (who we love) was away at the Yamaguchi Ed Office. Instead I had the wonderful Misugi (I think that is her name, argh, I was introduced to her at the very beginning ..) who is a cool young office lady and speaks the best English of them all I reckon. I had a meeting with a couple of officials from the Hagi City Office who are in charge of changing the town signs when the merger happens. They wanted me to help with making the signs bilingual. So there are 3 categories, the city office, the bigger town offices and the smaller town offices. I thought it was simple, City Office and (insert name of town) Branch Office. But no. It appears the Japanese want to use a different name for the branch offices depending on whether it is a big town or a small town. So we had a plethora of words being thrown around, we had Yamamoto-san using an online dictionary on his laptop, which he had hooked into the projector so that he could beam it up onto the wall for us all to see. The total contribution of that was to look up the translation for "deputy mayor" (?) and then he randomly said the word "comprehension" during one of the conversations (???). Oh dear.
In the end I decided that the clearest way to label the offices was to have the main City Office, bigger General Branch Offices and smaller Branch Offices. Apparently mayor Nomura-san had suggested having Regional Offices, which I said could be confusing, whereas General Branch Office both suggests something inferior to the main office and yet higher than the smaller town offices. Phew. I'm just glad that there's going to be so much less bureacracy from now on........ It's kinda scary to be responsible for the labelling of the signs put up next month. For all foreigners present and future to Hagi, I hope you get what the sign means!!!

Where Are You Joe

Rokocoko that is. I miss rugby. A lot. What I wouldn't give for a Tui and a night in a rugbyhead- filled pub watching a good match. I never knew I liked rugby this much.
So the news is - well, not much really. I bought a new bike, a cool blue mountain bike that I can zoom around Hagi on. My old bike, kindly provided free of charge by the Board of Education, was to be frank a piece of shite.
I have been craving trash T.V and so downloaded the first series of The O.C off Limewire (I'm a huge advocate of illegal file sharing). It is so full of cliches and obviously the next generation's version of Beverly Hills 90210. However, it's grown on me. Or "You know, it's like, grown on may" as Marissa would declare on the show. Has anyone else been watching this? Do they even have it in NZ. God knows. I grow more and more out of touch by the day. I get asked questions about English all the time at school and I have to think about it. I speak English every day to Dan, how can I possibly lose it. I just do sometimes. The scariest moment was when I was sweeping the local cemetary with some students before Xmas. They held up a pinecone and said "matsubokuri". I was like, cool. And then when they asked what it was in English, I couldn't remember. I spent 5 minutes panicking, wondering if I was deranged after all, it wasn't just my imagination. I was beginning to question if I had even ever seen one before.
I have 5 months before I get home to Masterton for my holiday. However, I think about it everyday. I just wonder what my reaction is gonna be. I think I might get reverse culture shock. It's gonna be weird being around so many gaijin. I'm scared of it. I'm comfortable in my world of being the odd one out, the one who speaks a different langauage. I must get out of my habit of talking loudly about people when they are around. It's just so easy to go "Wow, look at that incredibly hideous haircut" or "Aaaargh, that man is wearing high heels" to Dan when we are at the mall, knowing we can't be understood.
Now here is food for thought, when I go home I am really going to miss being surrounded by another langauge. I love the fact that here, there is always something to learn. At home there is just one language - it's gonna be like, what, everyone knows what I mean here? No way! Note to self: practice speaking without dumbing down vocabulary...