Butter rice~

Right before my last Japanese midterm, our sensei (Japanese for teacher, and often used as a suffix kind of for addressing teachers/doctors/"masters" - I use it so often for my teachers that it's pretty much become a habit for me to think of teachers as blahblahblah-sensei rather than Mr./Mrs. Blahblahblah ) introduced this show to us called Shinya Shokudo (roughly translated as midnight canteen/eaterie).

Talk about cruel and unusual punishment man. "Hey students, your midterm is like, in a couple days BUT HERE'S THIS SUPER INTERESTING DRAMA ABOUT FOOD good luck studying lololol."

Obviously, since I haven't failed yet (or watched the entire series yet) I still have some modicum of self control... but tonight since we have a long weekend, I figured it would be perfectly alright to practice some Japanese listening and play an episode (or two...).

The episode I was watching today was episode five: Butter Rice. Oh man. Butter rice. Totally like... my thing.

Butter rice has forever held a special place in my heart. There's something that's so nostalgic about it (or, as they'd say in Japanese, natsukashii) that keeps me coming back despite the oh my god this is unhealthy kind of feeling. But I mean really, how unhealthy is it when you consider the fact that a lot of other sauces that you'd put on it anyways probably aren't that much more nutritious than butter.

I like salt on my butter rice, rather than soy sauce. :) My grandpa used to eat it that way (my dad too) and one of my special skills is picking up the really probably not healthy but rather simple dishes from my grandfathers. Butter rice was one of them (oatmeal, salt, and butter is another one I think, and mizithera pasta from the Old Spaghetti Factory I picked up from my other grandpa).

Butter rice is also ridiculously easy to make. It's a good go to food for leftover rice when you're like, "crap, I have all this leftover rice but I need to use it up somehow but I'm pressed for time so I don't want to cook anything-slash-I just plain don't want to cook anything HEEYYYY butter salt and rice.

Pretty sure I'm going to die of a heart attack. Or clogged arteries. Or high blood pressure. One of those.

This week, the freshmen from the seminar I'm TAing asked if I could talk about Japanese food. I was shocked. They asked if I could talk, on a day that they didn't have class. A good number of students showed up too. ...I kinda got too excited by all the random random stuff you can talk about with food though, so I'm a little worried I was a bit too unorganized. Oh well. Hopefully it was interesting. Seriously though, I could talk about that stuff for hours and hours and hours and hours....

That reminds me though. I have Japanese homework due this weekend. I suppose I should go do that and stop thinking about food hahaha.

Japanese CMs

So commercials, or CMs as they're called in Japan, are pretty... interesting in Japan. Most of them, on the interesting scale, I would put up there with superbowl commercials. Some of them you're just kind of, wtf?

However, recently, due to the earthquake, many companies have actually pulled their advertisements because they don't want to be running them in the midst of a national crisis. I don't blame them. This means that there is pretty much only one company that's been running commercials - AC Japan, or Advertising Council Japan. They do things like public service announcements on tv. Breast exams, cancer screenings, so on.

At the end of every commercial they have this little jingle that, due to the fact that ALL the commercials are AC commercials and that there's a LOT of them, pretty much everyone who has even looked at a TV this past month knows it. They've also been running this あいさつ (aisatsu) greeting commercial for kids that basically teaches you the different phrases to say like "itadakimasu" or "ohayo" and combines them with animals.

You can watch that video here.

Since practically everyone knows this commercial, if you make a reference to it, there's a 98% chance that people have heard of it. This can lead to some pretty awesome things, especially if you have a super genki class full of boys who like to speak (even if it's not in English).

In my technical high school, we have a listening exercise at the beginning with this multiple choice section where they have to listen to the tape and circle the correct word and the correct meaning to match the word (it also uses, I swear, the cheesiest background music ever, and part of me dies a little every time I have to hear it, which is four times a day). Naturally, some of these answer combinations include A. Some include C. Some, though a little rarer, happen to be A and C.

So what did the super genki/energetic/talkative boys in my electricity class do?

We have the students volunteer to read out the questions and stuff, so they raised their hands and shouted quite energetically for us to pick them. Unwittingly, this past monday, we chose one of the kids thinking "isn't this great that they're volunteering?"

Little did we know how great it was going to be.

They *sang* the answer (AC) in the form of the AC jingle. So. Effin'. Hilarious. We had to stop for a minute or two because everyone was laughing so hard, us teachers included. Seriously, I think that's been a highlight of my teaching so far. The second most amusing time was probably today, when we played the Telephone game and instead of "I like to eat red fish with rice for lunch" one row answered "I like to eat red fish and Jeshika" for lunch.

I corrected them on my name and we told them what they had actually said in Japanese. Hilariousness. I felt kind of bad for laughing, but only a little.

Some spoofs off the AC commercials are pretty awesome too. So while the song is incredibly annoying since it gets stuck in my head (constantly) and I can now sing the entire jingle,some of the side products have been quite amusing.

On a more boring note, it's raining, but supposedly, rainy season hasn't actually started yet; this is just the rain from some typhoon somewhere. Le sigh. I don't mind the rain as long as I don't have anywhere I have to go, but oh god, the humidity.

I can't wait until summer. Not.

Crap, I totally have the AC aisatsu song stuck in my head now. And whose fault was that?