Nanhan

I see that I haven't been blogging much recently. This is a combination of being eternally just a little bit sick, of being up to my eyebrows in 'The Dark Tower' series by Stephen King, and of being lazy.

The reason I can't get entirely well is because every week I go to the elementary school, and so every week I am exposed to kid-germs. The perils of being a teacher.

I haven't really done anything over the last two weeks. Last Sunday I went to the school festival at Kamagadai. Because I had to get up early in the morning, I did not go out on Saturday night. Anyway, at the festival the students performed speeches, research projects, a piece of music and a play. Because there are so few students at the school, every single student had to participate in the concert, all the elementary students had to talk about their research, and all the Jr. High kids had to perform in the play.

Afterwards we had a mochi-zuki taikai (rice-cake making competition). We all had to take turns at bashing the rice with a mallet, me included. What we made was mochi - a sticky heavy play-doh like food. I know it sounds disgusting, but actually I'm quite fond of mochi. Then we ate lunch: mochi with boiled red beans (azuki), mochi with white bean powder (can't remember the name) and mochi in vegetable soup (zouni) and one mandarin each. Although I like all three dishes, especially zouni, eating them all together is very hard on the stomach. Straight after lunch there was volleyball. Although the volleyball was a student vs. parent tournament, I had to play too because of the scarcity of Jr. High students. I hadn't played volleyball for a decade or more. Despite that I did better than the parents if not as good as the students, so I didn't embarrass myself.

When I got home I ate some left-overs from the night before and then lay down to take a nap. I woke up 45 minutes later with the most painful stomach I can remember having experienced. It had bloated up up so that I looked 7 or 8 months pregnant, and was very hard. Moving sent stabs of pain shooting through me as if my stretched flesh were about to give way and rip open. It must have been the mochi of course. My stomach is just not used to eating so much of it at once. It probably didn't help that the left-overs I had eaten had been curry. I actually wondered if my appendix had burst, and if I were about to die. But I told myself I was being stupid, that it was my own fault and that there was nothing I could do about it. So I went back to bed for another 3 hours and when I woke up again I was mostly better again. But I still had a sore stomach on Monday. Then, horror of horrors, the school lunch was curry bread and zouni, the lumps of mochi floating therein laughing at me I'm sure. *sigh*

I have one other bit of news. It looks as if I will be going to South Korea over winter vacation. Nuclear missiles, bird flu and -7 degree temperatures aside, it is a great opportunity. I will be going with Miwa, and Miwa can speak Korean. As well as being able to navigate Seoul with ease, Miwa can also book hotels that only locals usually know about, instead of the over-priced ones tourists usually end up in. This means as well as my trip being language confusion-free, it will also be cheap. Yay!