Will It Go 'Round in Circles

Japanese class is divided into 4 periods each day and we have a different teacher each period. We go to a language lab for one of them for listening practice. The language lab is very close to the one we had in high school. There's the individual cassette tape things, a tv, and a headset with a microphone. Today we started off doing some basic listening exercises, listen to something and fill out a worksheet. We flipped over the worksheet to see something that started to make me uneasy. There was a series of random names in one column, followed by their age in another, their country in the next, and a blank column after that. At the top of the blank column it said "Things they like to do in Japan..." this was followed by "watch the video and then answer the questions".

The last name was "M***ael" (But in Japanese). The video started and low and behold, one of my teachers happened to see the commercial for the TV I was on on Saturday morning. She taped it and then gave it to the Language Lab teacher. My whole class, aboooout 40 people, saw it with me in the room. How many times? Twice. BUT I got a pretty awesome round of applause and laughs afterwards. My teachers gave me pretty good praise too, apparently people are impressed I know that song because it's "so Japanese." It was embarassing, but that's ok. A lot of the Japanese students at my school have apparently seen it too, when I walk into the cafeteria I can tell who has seen it because I'll hear "Zoom In" (The TV show) or "Ue wo Muite Arukou" (The songs REAL name, not "Sukiyaki") then giggles and people stare. People stare at me all the time though so it's nothing really new. Also I don't really care because I've already run, naked, into an old lady. It's gonna be hard to be really embarassed about anything after that one.