Sunday, June 27, 2010

Wheat and Rye Experiments

As a gift for my teacher who didn't know the difference between/anything about Rye or Wheat bread, my mom sent me a surprise package with a loaf of wheat and rye bread.

I delivered this to his desk and he smiled wide and said "Thank you!" moments later he appeared at my desk "Do you think you could come to my class and share this bread with the students??" "HECK YEAH!" I loved getting food in class when I was in school so I assumed they'd be no different.

So we brought the bread to 1st period class and first I talked about how big the average loaf size is compared to Japanese bread. I pulled out the bags and they grew excited. We gave a piece of bread to split between 4 students.

First I gave them the wheat. The general concensus was "This is very good, it tastes so American." Many of the students had studied abroad in America for 10 days and likely had wheat bread then. Then I took out the rye bread. Actually, I had two kinds of rye. First I gave them a pepridge farm rye. I had tasted it that morning and the flavor was a little weaker than the second rye. They kind of cringed, many said it tasted like cheese.

Then the last rye, this was clearly a more expensive rye and it was much stronger and, in my opinion, it was SUPER delicious.

Students gasped as they took their small nibbles of this bread. I don't think I could overstate the amount of disgust they felt as they attemtped to politely swallow it. "How is it??" I said. First there was silence... then they all started laughing. One student raised he hand, he looked like he was going to be sick. "Can I go drink some water? PLEASE???" The teacher said "OK." and with that, about half of the class got up and ran out into the hallway to drink water and throw their small pile of remaining bread away.

I asked them which they liked the best. Of course they all liked the wheat the best. I asked which was the worst, the last rye. They asked me and I said that actually the last rye was my favorite. "WHY!?!?!?!" asked one student. I think it made him feel sicker that I liked that one the best. "Because! It's DELICIOUS!" of course eating a piece of rye bread on it's own is a bit intense, especially for the first time.

There's a food here calle "Nattou." It's fermented soybeans. They're brown and they are insanely sticky, When you put some in your mouth, there will surely be little strings of this gooey sticky goo from the bowl to your mouth. Nattou is the test for American who come to Japan. Pretty much no one likes it...except for the Japanese, they LOVE it. Apparently it's insanely healthy. When Japanese people ask me if there's any foods I don't like or don't eat when we are selecting a meal, first they always go "Raw fish ...ok?" I say "Of course, anything is fine." Then they go, "Nattou???" and let me get this straight, I don't like nattou, but I don't hate it. The taste isn't so great but its tolerable, the goo-factor is the hardest part. So I go "Nattou is ok." They applaud. "WOW, so RARE!"

I've always wondered what the western version of nattou is. Now I know, it's rye bread.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

A video of my spring break trip

CLICK HERE FOR THE GREAT JAPAN TRIP!

This is from a 10 day trip I took with my friend from Niigata, Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo.

There's some strange audio artifacts and distortion that come up thanks to Youtube's awful compression but it's less audible after the first minute or so... enjoy!

-Mike

Monday, June 21, 2010

Another Creative Answer

When I have extra time in class, I like to give my students a short assignment where they recommend something to me.

Last week we learned about movies and how to talk about them so I asked for the students to recommend movies to me. They had about 10 minutes to write 4 short answers. The recommendation could be a western movie or a Japanese movie but it had to be written in English and it had to be a movie.

All they had to write was... (I wrote these directions on the board)
1) The title of the movie
2) When it came out (or guess if they don't know)
3) The genre
4) Why they recommend it

my favorite two answers were written completely in Japanese but here are the translations of them...

Student 1
1) Avatar
2) I don't know
3) Science Fiction
4) Because the humans turn blue.

Student 2
1) Udon (noodles)
2) Long ago
3) Food
4) Noodles are delicious, next period is lunch and I can only think of food.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Gross.

So something gross happens in this story...

I had this big bag of rice sitting in my apartment for a while and decided I should try and finish it up before I left. The easiest thing for me to cook that goes with rice is curry. I hadn't eaten curry in a while because it's not particularly healthy, but it's easy to make and tastes good so I treated myself.

I needed some things from the store, a carrot, an onion, some potatoes, and some chicken. I measured out my rice, washed it, and threw it in the rice cooker (it takes about 40 minutes to cook the rice). I went to the store, got my ingredients, came back and started cooking.

I made my curry in record time, I even found a piece of chicken in my fridge that was a few days old and cooked it with the rest of the food. I had to leave to pick up my girlfriend at the train station by 8:20 and I finished cooking at 8:00 and ate my dinner quickly. A big bowl of rice, a bowl of curry, a glass of water.

When I got back to my apartment I still wanted some rice, so I just took a big spoonful out of the rice cooker and ate some...

I thought I'd be a gentleman and offer m'lady, "Ya want some?" I held the spoon out to Hilary.

"No, thanks."

I brought the spoon back to my face and noticed a little something that didn't look like the rest of the rice.

"Oh my god, there are worms in my rice."

Little skinny white maggot worms with a teeny black dot on their head. There wasn't just one or two, there were a bunch.

My first thought was "Jeez, I must have left the rice cooker opened when I went to get Hilary at the train station." Then I realized they were cooked too and knew that they came from the old bag of rice.

We emptied out the rest of the rice from the rice cooker and it was peppered with little maggots. The rice in the bag still had some living ones that were crawling around... how wonderful. I guess it coulda been worse, but it's never a pleasant feeling to find those knowing you just had a big serving of them.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

The Food.

I was invited to give a special presentation about American food in Japan and Japanese food in America to some third year classes and let me tell you, I was excited. The only thing more exciting than talking to my students about food is actually eating the food. Most students don't really have a good idea of what food chains in Japan are actually American chains and I figured they'd find what Japanese foods Americans think are Japanese... but aren't really.

I printed out some menus and some photos and I was set.

First students had to guess a few chain stores that were American by were in Japan. We gave some descriptions...

"This is expensive ice cream that you can buy at the grocery store, 7-11, or at an actual ice cream store." Answer: Haagen Dazs

"This is a good place to go when you are in the mood for a hamburger, fries, and a coke. We sometimes call this place "The Golden Arches." Answer: McDonalds

there were a few more, but I'll spare you.

Other companies were Baskin Robbins, Pizza Hut, Subway (which just came to Niigata this year so no one has been yet), KFC (which they call "Kenta" or sometimes "Kentakki" for short), 7-11, and so on.

Then I explained about American pizza. I showed them a picture of New York style pizza. "See, it's thin and delicious looking." then I showed them Chicago "See, it's THICK and delicious looking." The giggled at the New York style photo but their jaws dropped about the Chicago style one. "IT'S TOO BIG TO BE CALLED A PIZZA!" "WHY IS ALL THE SAUCE IS ON TOP!?!?!" "DO PEOPLE BECOME SICK FROM TOO MUCH CHEESE???" Though, they all agreed it looked good.

Then they had to guess typical foods that we eat in America. I explained to them the difference between Japanese sandwiches and American sandwiches. Japanese sandwiches are often these little crustless danty white bread finger sandwiches with a bunch of lettuce, a layer of mayo, then one slice of meat. I showed them a picture of sub sandwiches from America, including a cross section of a sandwich from Potbelly's and they all, again, gasped. "SO MUCH MEAT!" "THERE'S TOO MUCH BREAD!" "IT'S TOO BIG TO FIT IN MY MOUTH!!!" They laughed and laughed and laughed.

Then we discssed how even though hamburgers are popular, they're not really a staple food (as many Japanese people seem to believe) and that a typical healthy person doesn't often eat a lot of hamburgers. I showed them tacos, burritos, and salsa. I talked about various pies (apple, pumpkin, peach, cherry, and so on...), of course the wonderful world of bagels, grilled meats, gyros, American Chinese food (which is pretty different than Japan's take), and Italian food (also pretty different from Japanese take).

Then I went on to explain Japanese food in America. "So, we have Sushi everywhere. Anytime you go to a Japanese restaurant in America, they have sushi...but also have OTHER foods like chicken teriyaki and other Japanese foods." This was a surprising concept for Japanese people because when it comes to Japanese restaurants in Japan, most of the time they specialize in ONE food. You got a sushi restaurant and can pretty much only get sushi, tempura shops sell tempura, ramen shops sell ramen, and soba shops sell soba. There's sometimes a few extra items hidden on menus, but you don't get menus that say like "FROM THE GRILL!" followed by a "SALADS AND SOUPS!" section with a "HOMEMADE PASTAS!" secion and then a "FIESTA MEXICANA!" section.

Then I went into my American style sushi lecture. In the world of Sushi there are two main kinds of styles, the "pressed" or "Nigiri" sushi and the "rolled" or "Maki" sushi. America's nigiri is pretty much the same as Japan's in terms of style and variety, but when it comes to Maki, we're worlds apart. You see, in Japan there is no "Spider Roll" or "Dragon Roll" or "Beauty and the Beast Roll" (which was on a menu I printed out for the class.) Japan has simple rolls, for the most part. Some fish or vegetables wrapped in rice and seaweed. Sometimes you come across "Futomaki" which means "Fat roll" which usually has egg, cucumber, pickled vegetables, and sometimes a kind of fish or crab in it. They usually look like this...

(Tuna roll)


(Futomaki)



So I showed them the American maki menu along with some photos like this...



...And then their heads literally exploded. They thought it was beautiful and also said it looked delicious, which surprised me. They'd never seen rice on the outside of the seaweed before either.

Don't get me wrong, Japan definitely has some creative sushi and even sushi art, but they aren't really common. Just for fun, here is some Japanese sushi art...





Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Tomato

I grade a lot of papers for the other teachers, they're often busy and I have time to grade stuff. It's actually pretty relaxing sometimes and it's fun to see what my students write about.

Today my students had to summarize a short essay they read about food migration. Most students wrote about 2 paragraphs... but there was one paper that just had three sentences on it that I found refreshing.

"Europeans brought tomatoes to North America. But the Native Americans grew tomatoes along the Atlantic coast to make for sightseeing and not eating. I think this is very insult to tomatoes."


My favorite part was that there was nothing about Native Americans growing tomatoes along the Atlantic coast for sightseeing in the essay at all.

-Mike

Fire Drill? What Fire Drill?

Wednesday is my half-day at my base school. In the morning I work at a school about 45 minutes away, then at lunch I drive back to my base school for the afternoon. When I arrived about 10 different teachers informed me of the fire drill planned for 7th period.

I was all "Yeah yeah yeah, got it." This was the first time this school had really informed me of anything this far in advance, I usually get a 5 minute lead on things like meetings, parties, festivals, and so on.

7th period started and I was grading some papers, then the bell went off. No teachers in the teachers office moved. I stayed seated and decided I'd take the cue from them. There was some announcement that students should exit in an orderly fashion out of the exit closest to their rooms (there are basically 2 exits in the school... though in a real emergency there's actually something closer to 5... including windows on the first floor... there are almost infinity.)

I noticed that many of the teachers were kind of gigglign and making jokes. They'd take out their handtowels and cover their mouthes and pretend to cough and choke. I decided I'd finish whatever I was grading then go... then I heard a stampede of students running down the hallway. This was my cue.

I looked up and all of the teachers had gone, I stepped into the hall and there was a giant cloud of white smoke flowing through the hallways. Students all had handtowels over their mouthes and were walking in an orderly fashion out of the building. The smoke grew heavier and heavier, luckily the teachers office isn't so far from the exit and the halls are really wide so there wasn't a problem. As I rounded the last turn toward the exit a group of firefighters came running into the building, "cover your faces!" We all kept going to the entry way of the school and I found myself thinking "am I supposed to change into my outdoor shoes? Is it OK to wear my indoor shoes OUTDOORS?" I saw another teacher run out the door in their own shoes. I decided not to change my shoes...a big risk.

We got outside and I was a little confused whether there actually was a fire or this was some elaborate fire drill. When I got outside there were more firemen in their gear standing outside. All the students lined up in their student number order and by year waiting for the final word.

I wanted to ask one of the other teachers "Was there ACTUALLY a fire?" but this would end in one of two ways.

1) "HAHA! YES! Did you REALLY think there was a fire??? We TOLD you there was a fire drill!"

2) "There are firemen all around us and there was smoke in all the hallways... can you do the math?"

I decided I'd wait and fire it out. Sure enough, it was an elaborate drill... with smoke machines and firefighters. I guess I could have changed into my outdoor shoes afterall, but no one else did.

This was only Part I of the fire drill. Part II involved everyone moving into the field where there was a giant can of gas, like you'd see on a gas grill, seven fire extinguishers and a long metal container with some mystery substance in it. A firefighter came and demonstrated that if you're in a fire, you should get a large plastic bag, fill it with air (not from your mouth) and put it over your head so you can breathe clean air while you escape. Then he got seven first-year students to come up.

He used lit a cigarette lighter, held it in front of the gas cannister and turned the nozzle. Immediately there was an ten foot stream of fire blowing across the field. "OOoooOOO!" He used this stream to light this mystery substance in the long metal container. It burst into flames and he handed one of the students an extinguisher and said "Put it out."

They repeated this seven times, once with each student. Each time reigniting the metal box with his makeshift flame thrower.

After this lesson on how to put out fires, we were given very specific instructions on how to clean our now-tainted indoor shoes off so when we go back in we don't ruin the beautiful floors. "First, stomp all the dirt off in the parking lot, drag your feet as you walk. When you get inside first walk across the green plastic mats, again dragging your feet. Then proceed to the damp towels were you will stand until your feet are clean.

So many lessons learned.