Culinary swings and roundabouts

No matter how foreign a country you live in, after a while things start to get old. So there’s loads of squiggly writing everywhere that I can’t read – ok. There’s a special set of slippers for me to put on when I go to the toilet – well, why not? One thing that never gets old in Japan, however, is food. Every mouthful is an adventure.
On my desk I keep a copy of the month’s school lunch menu. Over half of it is written in kanji that I can’t read or even say. The rest is written in a combination of hiragana and katakana syllabic characters – with these I at least have a fighting chance minimal comprehension as I can check them in my dictionary.
For school lunch, there is a healthy balance between western and Japanese cuisine – usually 10% western and 90% Japanese. Yesterday we had deep-fried cheesy-chicken along with plain white rice and the ubiquitous bowl of miso soup. Such a meal is a mixed blessing. While I enjoy the break from Japanese food, I fear as to what they are going to feed us the following day in order to correct the western-Japanese balance…
So, today I looked at the menu and saw loads of hiragana – "great," I thought, "it won’t be too Japanesey." Oh, Colin… have you learnt nothing in the last year?? I read the first line of the menu: “unagi go-han” (go-han means “rice”) “Hm, that’s odd,” I thought. I knew the word unagi from elementary school; Miyajima and Hari both have pet versions – unagi means rabbit (or so I thought). “Rabbit rice? That’s a funny one; I didn’t think they had that many rabbits in Japan what with all the rice fields. Oh well, stranger things…” So, off I trotted for lunch.
I got to the dinning hall and the first set of students I meet rushed over and said:

“Unagi go-han, can you eat?”
Sure, I’ve eaten rabbit before.
“Rabbit-o?? No, no – unagi... sea snake.”

Sometimes you only pick up on things when other people say them. Unagi is not rabbit, it’s eel. Usagi means rabbit. At this point my stomach did a triple backward summersault with a twist. “Eel rice… I can do this; it won’t be too odd, so long as the rest isn’t too Japanesey.” I saw the other trays of food that the kids were dishing out – curled up pieces of white flesh with a kind of criss-cross pattern on them. That’ll be squid. “That’s ok, at least I have my miso soup.” I decided to check out the piece de resistance, the unagi go-han. Well, what do you know? Very thoughtfully, they’d liberally sprinkled it with shirazu – whole baby fish, about 30 of them.
I’m proud to say that I managed to put it all away, but at about the same speed as the girliest of girls – I’m sure I’ve lost some manly respect from the 3rd grade boys…if there was any there to lose in the first place.

Ps. you know you work at a Japanese elementary school when… people hang out of the window shouting your name as you walk to work.

Pps. the photo is of me on a big communal (but flat?) bouncy castle. As you can see, much fun was had.