10/22/08
Nakatani Apartment, Nagoya

I woke up this morning feeling pretty yucky, coughing and leaking nattou. I was wary of popping the strange pills my host mother had, so she cooked up some sort of ginger tea concoction. That helped for a while, at least.

By the time I came into the office, my host mom had apparently called and given them a heads-up as to my condition. Throughout the morning, office people came up to me to say that they'd heard I was sick, and to ask how I was doing. Awfully thoughtful of them. After lunch, my coordinator arrived and, along with a lady who just happened to have a brand new sealed bottle of cold medicine, all but shoved three pills down my neck. I found that I am not good at taking pills. He gave me three more pills and told me to take them after dinner.

I visited the Hashimoto Party today. After a less-than-intuitive transfer to the JR system through Kanayama station, I arrived in a quaint little town somewhere to the southeast. The tutor actually had two consecutive parties, first being the younger party. I read (and half-translated) a picture book ("What is Halloween?"), juggled a lot, played the memory game, and got to stand behind a door to hand out candy to trick-or-treating Labo kids. We did a few songbirds too, of course. Had a great time! Oh yeah, and I did all this in front of a shutter-happy reporter for the local newspaper.

The second group was even better, mostly high-school/college kids who knew enough english to converse. We had sort of a pot-luck dinner, mostly rice balls of various sorts. Played some hacky sack, that's always fun. We did a theme activity, a story about Frederick the poetic field mouse. I got cast as Frederick. After the activity, we had a discussion about colors (a subject featured in the activity) and differences in perception. Some interesting differences: In Japan, one describes unripe fruit as blue, not green (that holds true to describe youth or newbness, e.g. greenhorn). The sun is not yellow, it ranges from red to orange throughout the sky. I explained a part of the story that didn't survive translation (a gotcha rhyme), they were really into that.

The party ended at eight, but through various train schedule misunderstandings (none of which were on my part!) I didn't get on a train until almost nine. Yay late.

On a side note, I think this entry could use maybe one more set of parenthesis. (There, perfect!)

3 comments:

Jeff said...

I am told it is very bad form in Japan to show up in public while sick... you don't want to be blamed for spreading the illness, even if you are not contagious. Perhaps you should take a few days off.

mamagotcha said...

Did you see this? Maybe blue fruit isn't so far off the mark.

Hope you're feeling better soon!

Cordell Newmiller said...

Haha, yes it is frowned upon to "spread illness" as such, that's why you see those surgeon masks all the time here.

Unfortunately, it's frowned upon even more to not show up for work. Unless you're dying, you show up. People don't get sick days here, me included. The whole concept of sleeping something off is pretty foreign here; you don't stay in bed to get better, you go to the hospital for pills and go about your day.

In this particular case it really wasn't that bad. Yeah, I felt a little crummy, but you wouldn't have known it from looking at me. The interesting part was how despite this, the entire office "heard I wasn't feeling well" through the gossip chain, and how concerned they were about a little cold.

Personally, I agree with you, taking a few days off sure does sound nice. I'm better for the most part now, though.

I wonder, are blueberries technically fruit? Hmm.

*search search*

How about that, they are. :D

~Cordell