Dinner
Went out to dinner on Monday night with some of Mike's friends from Kishiwada. I can't remind the Japanese name for the style of food- I'll update this when I get a chance to ask him. Everyone sits around a table that's at about shin level (you put your legs under the table, where the floor is sunken), and there's a big bowl of raw vegetables there and a cooking pot full of boiling water. You pour all the vegetables in and it's sort of like do-it-yourself soup, where they bring you different kinds of meat to put in. Alternatively, you pick up pieces of raw meat individually and move them around in the hot water until they're cooked. While you're doing this, you have to say, "shabu-shabu," which I was told is supposed to be onomatopoetic (for the sound the water makes?). There are a bunch of fun words like that here, including also "rabu-rabu," whose closest English translation is "lovey-dovey" (combined sometimes with a wide smile and pinching the thumb and index fingers together over and over, signifying "they're a couple").
This meal felt like taking my life in my hands for a couple reasons:
1. I was heartily encouraged to eat slices of raw chicken. The Japanese woman with us enthusiastically showed us that we weren't supposed to shabu-shabu this particular plate of chicken. She ate one. So I ate one, salmonella be damned.
2. When Mike ordered a bowl of rice, it came with a raw egg. You are supposed to crack the egg over the rice and enjoy the delicious mushy mix of raw egg and rice ("It's so good!" said one of the other JETs). I couldn't bring myself to taste it, but Mike was a trooper and ate most of it. Again, alarm bells were ringing at the idea of eating raw egg; apparently some things are safe to eat which I did not think were safe to eat.
48 hours have passed, and we haven't gotten sick. Leaving it at that.
Also, I went for a walk yesterday at the Kishiwada park and some of the ume (plum) trees are just starting to blossom.
This meal felt like taking my life in my hands for a couple reasons:
1. I was heartily encouraged to eat slices of raw chicken. The Japanese woman with us enthusiastically showed us that we weren't supposed to shabu-shabu this particular plate of chicken. She ate one. So I ate one, salmonella be damned.
2. When Mike ordered a bowl of rice, it came with a raw egg. You are supposed to crack the egg over the rice and enjoy the delicious mushy mix of raw egg and rice ("It's so good!" said one of the other JETs). I couldn't bring myself to taste it, but Mike was a trooper and ate most of it. Again, alarm bells were ringing at the idea of eating raw egg; apparently some things are safe to eat which I did not think were safe to eat.
48 hours have passed, and we haven't gotten sick. Leaving it at that.
Also, I went for a walk yesterday at the Kishiwada park and some of the ume (plum) trees are just starting to blossom.