Journal 8 - I think I just ate Mr. Ed

Well hello all, hope you're doing well .... It's another week gone by and as you can see this a slightly different place to be reading my stories. I wanted to do this for a few reasons ... The first is because it was kind of a pain sending the same message to different groups of emails. For some reason, Yahoo would not allow me to select every single email address I have and put them into one group. So, I've been selecting groups of about 50 at a time. Yeah, kind of annoying. The second reason is I can now post pictures and you can finally see where I am. For some of you who have Hotmail, you have limited space. Sending pictures was pretty much out of the question, because it would've filled your limit very fast. So, all in all I think this is easier. Please send me comments about this and let me know if I should continue this or not.

So, moving on ... it's been a very interesting week to say the least. Last weekend I ended up going out with one of my students. There was actually 6 of us who went. We went to a town called Fujieda which is about 8 minutes by train from Yaizu, so not too bad. We went to a Japanese restaurant/ bar for dinner (around 8:00). My student and my manager handled all the food ordering .... Yeah, that was a mistake. There were some interesting dishes ordered. Luckily, nothing was still moving. That's where I drew the line. Anyway, the first dish was of course raw meat ... Sushimi. I actually thought sushimi was like sushi, raw fish, but without the rice. Wellllllll, not exactly. So, I do have a philosophy and that philosophy is I will try everything once (except if it's moving). So, I tried it. You know, it actually wasn't that bad, nicely marinated, had no fishy taste, I kind of enjoyed it ... until they told me I just ate HORSE!!!! Now, the one thing I learned you never do is show fear ... so, when they told me, I had no expression on my face ... I nodded a few times, said yeah it wasn't bad ... meanwhile in my head I'm screaming "You bastards, how could you make me eat Black Beauty". They had a good laugh over it though. So, anyway, out comes the second dish ... looks very good, nicely breaded with some spices ... to me it looked like salt and pepper ribs. Wrong again!! I took one, popped it in my mouth, had a very good taste, kind of like pork. So, I'm thinking salt and pepper pork. Nope!!! WHALE!!! OK, so far Silver will never be High Ho'ing and Willy ain't so free anymore. Thank God the rest of the night did not get progressively worse ... I'm not sure if it was my nonchalant expression or if they just decided to give me a break, but luckily the rest of the dishes were normal ... chicken, rice, some seafoods like shrimp. I did have squid as well, but I've tried it before and really, you might as well be eating a car tire. I guess I should've clued in though when they asked me in the beginning if I was hungry and I said "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse". I'll never make that mistake again. Anyway, so the rest of the night did get better, we had a good time ... at my expense of course, but we had a good time. Fujieda is very good for their pubs, there are tonnes in this little town. We ended up going to an english style, actually American, style pub called "The Skin Flute" ... take it any way you want. But, it's owned by a man who spent some time in America and loved the atmosphere so much, he decided to open a bar with the same theme. Now the name? Well, this man enjoyed learning english, especially the more colorful expressions. But, the bar is very much normal, don't worry. It was great, nice atmosphere, played some free pool all night ... You definitely don't get that at home unless you have it in your house. We ended up staying there the rest of the night (usually when you go out in Japan, it means bar hopping, so this was unusual). Definitely fun times.

The rest of the week was alright ... well, kind of ... all I can say is I'm glad it's over. I won't get into the details, but to start, that stranger who was following me did catch up to me and instead of going straight for the jugular, went for the ears ... So, to add to the list of "Firsts" ... I had my first experience at the doctors ... very strange not being able to talk for myself. I had to have one of my co-workers translate everything for me. So, yes, that means she had to come in with me. I felt like I was 5 again, seeing the doctor with my mom. Anyway, long story short, it was an ear infection due to my cold and they gave me drugs. Then the rest of the week was progressively worse because of that "stage mom" again ... I wonder how Japan looks upon murder by foreigners. No details necessary, she complained because her child knows everything, blah blah blah ... whatever, she'll never be happy, so I just take it as a "cultural experience".

Anyway, I better close now. I hope everyone is doing well and again please let me know what you think of this. You can still email me at my regular email. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the most important thing ... I now have internet at home ... woohooo!!! I'm very happy ... a good way to end the week. I also want to mention that there are people who just recently got added to my list ... mainly because I was sitting down looking at the book you all wrote in at my party and then noticed that some of you gave me email addresses. Hmmm, maybe I should've saw those earlier. So, I apologize for not adding you earlier, but the good news is ... you can now join in on the adventures and I have posted the recent stories as well for you to look at.

Take care everyone,
Joe